Professor Emeritus of Economics William Fischel has been awarded the 2025 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in property law scholarship.
Fischel, who is also the Hardy Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies, received the award at William & Mary Law School’s 22nd annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference this month in Williamsburg, Virginia. The prize, which honors scholars whose work affirms the fundamental importance of property rights, places Fischel among an elite group of previous recipients including retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and leading legal scholars from across the country.
“We are proud to honor Professor William Fischel for his many contributions to our understanding of property and its central place in our society,” said James Stern, professor of law at William & Mary Law School and director of its Property Rights Project. “His work has helped illuminate the complex and critical role that property, local governance, and land-use institutions play in preserving individual liberty and economic vitality."
Professor of Economics Elizabeth Cascio says she can’t think of anyone more deserving of this prize, noting that Fischel “has devoted his career to its very essence—understanding property rights, land use, and local governance.”
Fischel’s excellence as a mentor is legendary among his colleagues in the Department of Economics, Cascio says. “With elegance and good humor, he has shown us that local political phenomena as diverse as zoning decisions, the drawing of school district boundaries, and property tax revolts have fundamentally economic rationales. It’s a compelling idea that, working with Bill, became central to my most important research contributions.”
Cascio describes him as a model teacher-scholar whose influence extends far beyond her own career. “He taught generations of Dartmouth students urban and land use economics in ECON 38, a course that remains heavily influenced by his scholarship.”
Left to right: Andy Brigham, William Fischel, and James Stern, professor of law at William & Mary Law School, at the 2025 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference (Photo by David Morrill)
“This award is a very nice capstone for me in that I've been retired for six years,” Fischel says, reflecting on the honor.
He says he finds the recognition particularly meaningful because it comes from the legal community—a field he entered as an economist nearly five decades ago. (Most past recipients of the award have law degrees.) The conference offered what Fischel calls “the roundness and fullness” of a long career. He was commented on by former students and colleagues, the same way he has served as a commentator for other scholars' work throughout his decades in the field.
At the intersection of economics and zoning
Fischel’s journey into this interdisciplinary field began with a question that seemed simple but had profound implications: How do communities control who lives there and how they develop? Writing his dissertation in 1973, he explored local government through the lens of what economists called “voting with your feet”—the idea that people choose where to live based on the public goods those communities provide, particularly schools.
“The question is, how do people get into these communities?” Fischel explains. “They have to buy or rent a house. How do the houses get built there? How do they control the size of the community, the influx of residents? The economic answer is zoning—establish minimum lot size, how big the house can be, and so on.”
What makes Fischel unique as a scholar is his willingness to dive deep into the legal mechanics that most economists ignore. “I think I was the first economist to unpack this—what does zoning do and put it into an economic context,” he says.
He never attended law school, though he did take courses at Vermont Law School and served two stints on a local zoning board, gaining firsthand regulatory experience that informed his scholarship.
His 2001 book The Homevoter Hypothesis, which remains central to debates about property and local governance today, explores how homeownership motivates citizens to engage with local government entities. Over the course of his career, he has authored five books and numerous articles examining the intersection of property rights, local government, and economic policy.
In January, Fischel will deliver the keynote speech at a George Mason University Law School event marking the 100th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s approval of local zoning in the landmark 1926 case Euclid v. Ambler Realty.
A new chapter: the origins of American counties
Rather than stepping back from scholarship in retirement, Fischel has spent the past six years on an ambitious new project: a comprehensive study of the origins of American counties. The research combines history, economic theory, and law to explain why counties exist and how they evolved.
“It’s a mix of history, economic theory, and law,” Fischel says. “There’s the economic and political theory of why we need counties, then history from very local sources.”
The project involves surveying all 50 states, examining two counties in each, and documenting how county boundaries changed throughout the 19th century. He plans to publish it as a working paper on the Social Science Research Network, divided into five parts covering regions from New England to Hawaii.
“I don’t take a vacation from it because it’s a lot of fun,” Fischel says of his ongoing research.