Real Estate & Property Law

History's Lost Black Towns

Posted on February 28, 2011
The Root profiles 15 Black communities that history threatens to forget: Black Americans have played a vital role in building this nation. Eager to live and prosper as free people, we have established our own towns since Colonial times. Many...

Garnett on Land Use Patterns, Disorder, and Crime

Posted on February 28, 2011
Nicole Garnett (Notre Dame) has posted The People Paradox on SSRN. Here's the abstract: American land-use regulators increasingly embrace mixed-land-use "urban" neighborhoods, rather than single-land-use "suburban" ones, as a planning ideal. This shift away from traditional regulatory practice reflects a...

Restrictive Covenants in Custom Home Subdivisions

Posted on February 27, 2011
The Indianapolis Star has an interesting article this morning describing a situation that is doubtlessly occuring in many upscale communities across the country. There are several subdivisions in Hamilton County, just north of Indianapolis, that were marketed as available to...

Submitting Law Review Articles this Season?

Posted on February 26, 2011
I'm finishing up my article on policy responses to the commercial real estate debt crisis, hoping to submit it to law reviews next week. I am planning to submit to a few policy journals, but mostly general law reviews since,...

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Easements in the News

Posted on February 25, 2011
Over at Land Use Prof, Jessica Owley shines a light on a recent article from the Washington Post that discusses the trouble that easements can cause for buyers of land. The basic story goes like this: In 2003, the Sandler...

The Space of Revolution

Posted on February 25, 2011
Nezar AlSayyad, a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Berkeley, discusses the role that the design of Tahrir square played in the Egyptian Revolution: Twenty-three streets lead to different parts of it, which is why it was so successful...

ALPS: Are you going?

Posted on February 24, 2011
I'm curious to know how many of our readers will be attending the ALPS conference next week. If you're going, leave a comment, and if you're presenting tell us that too. I'll be there and will be presenting, and I'm...

Treatises

Posted on February 24, 2011
A question has popped up that I don't know how to answer; What are the leading multi-volume real property law treatises? Where do you property profs and practicioners turn when you need clarification on the law? Steve Clowney [Comments are...

Conference News: The Struggle for Land

Posted on February 23, 2011
The Newberry Library in Chicago is hosting what looks to be a really excellent symposium on the history and theory of property rights. The one-day conference, entitled The Struggle for Land: Property, Territory, and Jurisdiction in Early Modern Europe and...

Dagan's New Book - Property: Values and Institutions

Posted on February 23, 2011
Oxford University Press has just published Hanoch Dagan's new book Property: Values and Institutions. Here is the publisher's description: Property: Values and Institutions, by Hanoch Dagan, offers an original understanding of property, different from the dominant voices in the field,...

Who Owns Urban Homesteading?

Posted on February 22, 2011
A warning to all you urbanites who raise chickens in your backyard or engage in extreme gardening; Be careful how you refer to your hobbies. According to this story from the L.A. Times, Jules Dervaes of Pasadena has recently trademarked...

Eagle on Urban Revitalization and Eminent Domain

Posted on February 22, 2011
Steven Eagle (George Mason) has posted a draft of Urban Revitalization and Eminent Domain: Misinterpreting Jane Jacobs (Albany Govt Law Review) on SSRN. Here's the abstract: This article reviews the implications for land use policy of Jane Jacobs? The Death...

Can an E-mail Satisfy the Statute of Frauds?

Posted on February 22, 2011
It can in New York, according to the 2010 decision in Naldi v. Grunberg, 80 A.D.3d 1, 908 N.Y.S.2d 639 (N.Y.A.D. 2010). In the opinion, the court wrote that "[W]e would conclude that the terms "writing" and "subscribed" in General...

Nollan & Dolan as Wisconsin's Future?

Posted on February 21, 2011
Like Mark, Ricks Hills over at Prawfs sees the fight in Wisconsin through a property lense. Hills compares the governor's proposal to limit public sector collective bargaining to Nollan-Dolan's attempt to scale back exactions imposed on developers. He argues that...

Will Access Trump Ownership?

Posted on February 21, 2011
Lisa Gansky, in a short TED talk, argues that the renting of stuff is gradually becoming more important and useful than full ownerhsip: Steve Clowney [Comments are held for approval, so there will be some delay in posting]

Collective Bargaining Is a Property Rights Issue

Posted on February 20, 2011
There's an interesting thread over at the Faculty Lounge about the Wisconsin brouhaha, in which Professor Calvin Massey opines that collective bargaining by public employee unions should be illegal. Personally, I think that position is illogical and even dangerous, but...

Planning the World's Newest Nation

Posted on February 17, 2011
Urban Planning is up and running in South Sudan. Matt Yglesias isn't impressed: I don?t think you necessarily want too much ?planning? of a growing city at all. I?d like to see land used roughly as densely as market conditions...

A Spite Cross?

Posted on February 16, 2011
Carl Behr, a landowner in suburban Pittsburgh, has refused to remove a 24-foot illuminated cross from his property, despite warnings from government officials that the structure violates a number of local ordinances. Behr claims the cross is "about the Lord"...

Foreclosure Crisis Update

Posted on February 15, 2011
The number of foreclosures in Minnesota quintupled between 2005 and 2008, according to this report released by www.Housinglink.org. And the trend is continuing upwards on an annual basis (although foreclosures dropped in the 4th quarter of 2010). Foreclosures cause foreclosures,...

How Skyscrapers Can Save the City

Posted on February 15, 2011
Ed Glaeser, one of the nation's preeminent urban economists, has a new piece in The Atlantic on the importance of encouraging tall buildings: Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting, tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster...

Property, Student Notes, and Elite Law Schools

Posted on February 14, 2011
Andrew Yaphe (Stanford Law School) has posted Taking Note of Notes: Student Legal Scholarship in Theory and Practice. At its core, the piece provides "an empirical analysis of recent student notes, enabling the reader to get an overview of the...

Teaching Zoning Soon?

Posted on February 13, 2011
You could construct a whole course out of this map, published by the Minneapolis Council of Social Agencies in 1937 and more recently re-appearing in this book. Hat tip to Professor Diane Dube of the Mitchell Community Development Clinic for...

Shameless Self-Promotion Department

Posted on February 12, 2011
For those interested, my article Acceptable Deviance and Property Rights has now been published in the Connecticut Law Review. Here's the abstract: Compliance with - or deviance from - law is often dependent upon the law?s convergence with - or...

Merrill and Smith on Making Coasean Property More Coasean

Posted on February 11, 2011
Tom Merrill (Columbia) and Henry Smith (Harvard) have posted Making Coasean Property More Coasean (Journal of Law and Economics). Here's an abstract: In his pioneering work on transaction costs, Ronald Coase presupposed a picture of property as a bundle of...

White House Releases Plan for the Future of Housing Financing Market

Posted on February 11, 2011
The White House released a proposal today that would dramatically alter the long-term future of the American housing financing market, in ways that are almost as important and fundamental as the creation of the FNMA (later Fannie Mae) in 1938....

On the Business of Selling Human Body Parts

Posted on February 09, 2011
Wired magazine has an excellent feature on the (black)market for human body parts. The piece has lots of neat (if ghoulish) factoids. I, for example, would have guessed that skin sells for more than $10 a square inch... Steve Clowney...

An Inside Look at Buying Rent Controlled Apartments

Posted on February 08, 2011
This weekend the N.Y. Times ran a story on the murky world of developers who buy rent-controlled buildings and then attempt to buy-out the tenants: A whole industry is built around paying tenants to move, and it is cloaked in...

Buffalo Law Conference on Hydrofracking

Posted on February 07, 2011
Save The Date and Call for Presentations Hydrofracking: Exploring the Legal Issues in the Context of Politics, Science, and the Economy March 28-29, 2011 at University at Buffalo School of Law Buffalo, New York On March 28-29, 2011 the University...

The Packers, Property and Community

Posted on February 05, 2011
I agree whole-heartedly with Steve's great post, but when we're talking about football, property and community, we have to talk about the beloved Packers. The Packers are the only NFL team actually -- not metaphorically -- owned by the community....

On Property, Community, and the Steelers

Posted on February 04, 2011
The great Liverpool coach Bill Shakly once remarked, "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." I have...

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