This paper examines judicial and legislative modifications to a specific property rule, the benefit offset, which was widely employed by railroad companies during the 19th century as a way to reduce required compensation for land taken through eminent domain. At the beginning of the railroad boom, all states allowed the benefit offset; by the end of the boom, most states had banned it, some via court decisions, others via legislation. Consistent with a simple model in which a court and a legislature act as (imperfect) agents of the public: 1) challenges to the benefit offset generally began with litigation; 2) all states that litigated the offset eventually restricted it, but not always through litigation; 3) where courts chose to allow the offset, legislation restricted it, often with substantial lags; 4) those lags tended to be longer (i.e., more time passed between litigation and subsequent legislation) when the litigation efforts took place early in the track building process (at which time the offset was more likely to be socially valuable); 5) states that never banned the benefit offset were those where landowners were unlikely to have ever been harmed by the practice (principally western states with vast expanses of public and private land). The model and historical evidence illustrate how a system that grants both the court and the legislature the power to alter property rules can establish a beneficial redundancy that increases the value of modifiable property rules.

中文翻译：

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法院、立法机构和不断发展的财产规则：征用权的经验教训


本文探讨了对特定财产规则（即利益抵消）的司法和立法修改，该规则在 19 世纪被铁路公司广泛采用，作为减少通过征用土地所需补偿的一种方式。在铁路繁荣之初，所有州都允许利益抵消；到繁荣结束时，大多数州都已禁止它，一些州通过法院判决，另一些州通过立法。与法院和立法机关充当公众（不完美）代理人的简单模式一致：1）对利益抵消的挑战通常始于诉讼； 2) 所有对抵消提起诉讼的州最终都对其进行了限制，但并不总是通过诉讼； 3) 当法院选择允许抵消时，立法会对其进行限制，而且往往有很大的滞后性； 4) 当诉讼工作发生在轨道建设过程的早期时（此时抵消更有可能具有社会价值），这些滞后往往更长（即诉讼和后续立法之间经过的时间更长）； 5) 从未禁止利益抵消的州是那些土地所有者不太可能因这种做法而受到伤害的州（主要是拥有大片公共和私人土地的西部州）。该模型和历史证据说明了赋予法院和立法机关改变财产规则权力的制度如何能够建立有益的冗余，从而增加可修改财产规则的价值。