Recovering stolen property is analytically equivalent to dispute settlement enforcement

Evidence

According to Contorno: “The Cosa Nostra was born to help the poor and helpless… If something happened to [these] people, they did not go to the Carabinieri; they came to the family of their area [and said], ‘They stole my car,’ ‘they stole [from] my house,’ and we found those things for them” (TC-GdS, April 12, 1986). Since a theft can be seen as a breach of a particular contract called property rights, as I argued in Chapter 1, in analytical terms this form of protection is like dispure settlement. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 434

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Gambetta’s analytical move: reframes anti-theft protection as enforcement of a property-rights contract, unifying the chapter under one model.

Related

• Theft can be analytically reduced to a contract breach over property rights (similarity 0.92)