“Would you like to financially sponsor a law student going into public interest?” It would be less destructive for me to financially sponsor boko haram

In Anglo-American law, we have this concept called “property.” It means that for land you own—“your property”—you get to freely occupy it, alter it, benefit from its use, and exclude others from it. You can grant other people rights to use it on a temporary basis by contract. This is, at bottom, a pretty good system for managing land. It aligns incentives pretty well and leads to broad land improvements and greater prosperity overall. The government exercises reasonable limits on how one may use their property (especially if it impinges on other people’s use of their own property) but ideally these public regulations should be pretty light. The best thing about property is clarity of title. If it’s clear who owns some property, and who possesses what rights with respect to that property, then everyone can behave rationally. When it’s not clear who owns property, all sorts of problems emerge. Basically the downfall of civilization is lack of clarity of title. Both public and private efforts to clarify title are per se virtuous, and anyone who seeks to systematically muddy title is, in my view, essentially evil.