By Hudson Kingston Last June the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, died. She had won her award and made her career by expanding on the concept of the commons, as in “the tragedy of the commons”—a fundamental concept to environmental law. Essentially the idea (when it is simplified for lawyers) amounts to stopping private parties from squandering a resource by making private/public rights to exclude people from overusing/overpolluting/overfishing as none of us can …