Law Commons^™

Laying To Rest An Ancien Régime: Antiquated Institutions In Louisiana Civil Law And Their Incompatibility With Modern Public Policies, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Man faces unprecedented challenges as he barrels through the twenty-first century. The world is now approaching a population of seven billion people, concentrated largely in crowded, overdeveloped urban centers. Global climate change is predicted to cause massive population displacement related to the disappearance of coastal lands and to create dire food shortages within the coming decade. Increasingly, societies are forced to make systemic adaptations to handle the strain of these modern-day crises. Governments must be innovative and adaptive in their efforts to protect the public. When the fundamental goals and objectives of society alter, the law should be modified to …

Private Rights In Public Lands: The Chicago Lakefront, Montgomery Ward, And The Public Dedication Doctrine, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

When one thinks of how the law protects public rights in open spaces, the public trust doctrine comes to mind. This is especially true in Chicago. The modem public trust doctrine was born in the landmark decision in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, growing out of struggles over the use of land along the margin of Lake Michigan in that city. Yet Chicago's premier park – Grant Park, sitting on that land in the center of downtown Chicago – owes its existence to a different legal doctrine. This other doctrine, developed by American courts in the nineteenth century, …

Unnatural Resource Law: Situating Desalination In Coastal Resource And Water Law Doctrines, Michael Pappas

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers the first legal analysis of desalination, the process of converting saltwater into freshwater. Desalination represents a key climate change adaptation measure because the United States has exploited nearly all of its freshwater resources, freshwater demands continue to grow, and climate change threatens to diminish significantly existing freshwater supplies. However, scholarship has yet to address the legal ambiguities that desalination raises in the context of property, water law, and coastal resource doctrines.

This Article addresses these ambiguities and suggests the legal adaptations necessary to accommodate desalination as a climate change adaptation. Under current legal doctrines, the chain of …

Constitutional Limitations On Land Use Controls, Environmental Regulations And Governmental Exactions (2011 Edition), Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

This electronic book is published in a searchable PDF format as a part of the E-scholarship Repository of the University of Maryland School of Law. It is an “open content” casebook intended for classroom use in courses in Land Use Control, Environmental Law and Constitutional Law. It consists of cases carefully selected from the two hundred years of American constitutional history which address the clash between public sovereignty and private property. It considers both the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. The text consists of non-copyrighted material and readers are free to use it or re-mix …