Property exemplifies the virtues and the perils of the rule of law. As I will show, considerations of information cost call for a high degree of formalism in property law, compared to contract. The in rem aspect of property in particular has to be communicated to a large and indefinite audience. However, a subset of that audience can be expected to take hard-to-foresee kinds of advantage of the system of bright-line rules by finding loopholes. Such opportunism calls for limited intervention traditionally associated with courts of equity and embodied in equitable maxims, defenses, and remedial doctrines, all of which serve to bolster formal law in the face of misuse by
opportunists.