“If the first seeing, starting, or pursuing such animals...should afford the basis of actions against others for intercepting and killing them, it would prove a fertile source of quarrels and litigation”

“However uncourteous or unkind the conduct of Pierson towards Post, in this instance, may have been, yet his act was productive of no injury or damage for which a legal remedy can be applied. We are of opinion the judgment below was erroneous, and ought to be reversed.”

“[A] fox is a "wild and noxious beast." Both parties have regarded him, as the law of nations does a pirate, "hostem humani generis,"...His depredations on farmers and on barn yards, have not been forgotten; and to put him to death wherever found, is allowed to be meritorious, and of public benefit. Hence it follows, that our decision should have in view the greatest possible encouragement to the destruction of an animal, so cunning and ruthless in his career.”

“But who would keep a pack of hounds; or what gentleman, at the sound of the horn, and at peep of day, would mount his steed, and for hours together...pursue the windings of this wily quadruped, if, just as night came on, and his stratagems and strength were nearly exhausted, a saucy intruder, who had not shared in the honours or labours of the chase, were permitted to come in at the death, and bear away in triumph the object of pursuit?”

“If market transactions were costless, all that matters (questions of equity apart) is that the rights of the various parties should be well-defined and the results of legal actions easy to forecast.

“But...the situation is quite different when market transactions are so costly as to make it difficult to change the arrangement of rights established by the law.”

“In such cases, the courts directly influence economic activity.”

“Even when it is possible to change the legal delimitation of rights through market transactions, it is obviously desirable to reduce the need for such transactions and thus reduce the employment of resources in carrying them out.”

“However, I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs. The significance to me of the Coase theorem is that it undermines the Pigovian system. Since standard economic theory assumes transaction costs to be zero, the Coase theorem demonstrates that the Pigovian solutions are unnecessary in these circumstances. Of course, it does not imply, when transaction costs are positive, that government actions (such as government operation, regulation, or taxation, including subsidies) could not produce a better result than relying on negotiations between individuals in the market. Whether this would be so could be discovered not by studying imaginary governments but what real governments actually do. My conclusion: let us study the world of positive transaction costs,” (p.717).

“[W]hat are traded on the market are not, as is often supposed by economists, physical entities, but the rights to perform certain actions, and the rights which individuals possess are established by the legal system.” (p.717).

“Because of [transaction costs], the rights which individuals possess, with their duties and privileges, will be, to a large extent, what the law determines. As a result, the legal system will have a profound effect on the working of the economic system and may in certain respects be said to control it. It is obviously desirable that these rights should be as- signed to those who can use them most productively and with incentives that lead them to do so and that, to discover (and maintain) such a distribution of rights, the costs of their transference should be low...” (pp.717-718)