Law Commons^™

Who Should Protect The Forest: Conservation Easements In The Forest Legacy Program, Jessica Owley, Stephen J. Tulowiecki

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Neoliberal Land Conservation And Social Justice, Jessica Owley

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The People Paradox, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

U.S. land-use regulators are increasingly embracing 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 growing endorsement of Jane Jacobs’s influential argument that mixed-land-use urban neighborhoods are safer and more socially cohesive than single-land-use suburban ones. Proponents of regulatory reforms encouraging greater mixing of residential and commercial land uses, however, completely disregard a sizable empirical literature suggesting that commercial land use generates, rather than suppress, crime and disorder, and that suburban communities have higher levels of social capital than urban communities. This Article constructs a case for mixed-land-use …

Conservation Easements At The Climate Change Crossroads, Jessica Owley

Journal Articles

The essence of a conservation easement as a static perpetual restriction is coming to a head with the understanding that the world is a changing place. This demonstration is nowhere more dramatic than in the context of global climate change. In response to this conflict, users of conservation easements face the decision of either (1) changing conservation easement agreements to fit the landscape or (2) changing the landscape to fit the conservation easements. Both of these options present benefits and challenges in implementation. Where conservation easement holders’ ultimate goal is to keep a maximum number of acres under protection from …

Distributed Graduate Seminars: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Studying Land Conservation, Jessica Owley, Adena R. Rissman

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Enforceability Of Exacted Conservation Easements, Jessica Owley

Journal Articles

The use of exacted conservation easements is widespread. Yet, the study of the implications of their use has been minimal. Conservation easements are nonpossessory interests in land restricting a landowner’s ability to use her land in an otherwise permissible way, with the goal of yielding a conservation benefit. Exacted conservation easements arise in permitting contexts where, in exchange for a government benefit, landowners either create conservation easements on their own property or arrange for conservation easements on other land.

To explore the concern associated with the enforceability of exacted conservation easements in a concrete way, this article examines exacted conservation …

Changing Property In A Changing World: A Call For The End Of Perpetual Conservation Easements, Jessica Owley

Journal Articles

Increasing environmental problems, including those associated with climate change, highlight the need for land conservation. Dissatisfaction with public methods of environmental protection has spurred conservationists to pursue private options. One of the most common private land conservation tools is the conservation easement. At first blush, this relatively new servitude appears to provide a creative method for achieving widespread conservation. Instead, however, conservation easements often fail to accommodate the reality of our current environmental problems. These perpetual (often private) agreements lack flexibility, making them inappropriate tools for environmental protection in the context of climate change and our evolving understanding of conservation …

Restoring Lost Connections: Land Use, Policing, And Urban Vitality, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Justice William Brennan rightfully reminded all of us that state constitutional law is too often neglected in our courtrooms and our classrooms. State constitutions, to borrow from the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ought not to be "relegated to the status of a poor relation" in our constitutional legal structure. They differ in important ways from the federal law Constitution-and those differences provide the space within which our democratic experiment flourishes. And I am sure if Justice Brennan were here with us today, he would agree that we also should not neglect the study of the state and local policies …

Governing? Gentrifying? Seceding? Real-Time Answers To Questions About Business Improvement Districts, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Business improvement districts (BIDs) have become a ubiquitous feature of the urban development toolkit. An important - perhaps the most important - instantiation of the trend in urban governance toward the devolution of local authority to new sublocal, quasi-governmental institutions, BIDs play an important role in urban re-development efforts, especially efforts to revitalize downtowns and satellite center-city business districts. Drawing upon case studies of Philadelphia’s BIDS, this symposium essay seeks to answer three questions about how BIDs actually work on the ground: First, whether BIDs are actually functioning as local governments rather than quasi-private providers of supplemental services; second, whether …

The Order-Maintenance Agenda As Land Use Policy, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Debates about the broken windows hypothesis focus almost exclusively on whether the order-maintenance agenda represents wise criminal law policy — specifically on whether, when, and at what cost, order-maintenance policing techniques reduce serious crime. These questions are important, but incomplete. This Essay, which was solicited for a symposium on urban-development policy, considers potential benefits of order-maintenance policies other than crime-reduction, especially reducing the fear of crime. The Broken Windows essay itself urged that attention to disorder was important not just because disorder was a precursor to more serious crime, but also because disorder undermined residents’ sense of security. The later …

Land Trusts That Conserve Communities, James J. Kelly

Journal Articles

Much has been written about land trusts that conserve wilderness, agriculture or other environmentally beneficial uses that would be threatened by unfettered development. In the context of inner-cities, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) conserve neighborhoods. Like their environmental and agricultural counterparts, CLTs employ use restrictions to prioritize communally beneficial development. Conserving communities, however, requires other legal tools as well. CLTs create and sustain permanently affordable homes to break the market’s bias toward socioeconomic homogeneity. CLTs also make room, literally, for green space, sites of shared culture and other productive activities that the market tends to commercialize or marginalize. By sustaining a …

Homes Affordable For Good: Covenants And Ground Leases As Long-Term Resale-Restriction Devices, James J. Kelly

Journal Articles

Covenants and ground leases have been, and continue to be, used to create shared spaces that are fundamentally, and often invidiously, exclusive. Famously made a dead letter in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer, covenants banning resale to nonwhite households put the force of law behind the segregated birth of America’s suburbs. Today, gated residential communities and shopping malls assure a degree of class exclusivity through covenants and commercial ground leases, respectively. These same legal mechanisms, however, are now deployed to assure long-term inclusion as well.

Developers of affordable housing are creating homes that are not only beneficial to the …

Governing Certain Things: The Regulation Of Street Trees In Four North American Cities, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

Most sociolegal studies of the urban street focus on the human element. By focusing on the tree, my Article offers a unique perspective on the interrelations between various actors within the public spaces of modern North American cities. Situated at the intersection of legal geography, anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies, this Article demonstrates how natural artifacts function as technologies of governance, thereby masking crucial political interventions behind a natural facade. The tensions between nature and the city, as embedded in both the construction and the regulation of street trees, provide an unusual perspective on the management of urban populations …

Anti-Exclusionary Zoning In Pennsylvania: A Weapon For Developers, A Loss For Low-Income Pennsylvanians, Katrin Rowan

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Suburbs As Exit, Suburbs As Entrance, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Most academics assume that suburbanites are exiters who have abandoned central cities. The exit story is a foundational one in the fields of land-use and local-government law: Exiters' historical, social, and economic connections with their center cities are frequently used to justify both growth controls and regional government. The exit story, however, no longer captures the American suburban experience. For a majority of Americans, suburbs have become points of entrance to, not of exit from, urban life. Most suburbanites are enterers - people who were born in, or migrated directly to, suburbs and who have not spent time living in …

Planning As Public Use?, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

This short Essay explores the Supreme Court's suggestion in Kelo v. New London that public, participatory planning may be a constitutional safe harbor that separates impermissible private takings from presumptively valid public ones. After briefly reviewing the Court's discussion of the planning that preceded the Kelo litigation, the Essay examines how Kelo's emphasis on planning departs from standard rational basis review of economic policies and asks what such a departure means for future public-use litigants. The Essay then explores three possible practical benefits of a constitutional rule that encourages the government to engage in detailed planning before exercising the power …

Relocating Disorder, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Judicial challenges to order-maintenance policing apparently are leading some city officials to adapt the tools of property regulation to a task traditionally reserved for the police - the control of disorderly people. Examples of efforts to regulate disorder, ex ante, through land-management strategies include homeless campuses that centralize housing and social services, neighborhood exclusion zone policies that empower local officials to exclude disorderly individuals from struggling communities, and the selective targeting of inner-city neighborhoods for aggressive property inspections. These tactics employ different management techniques - some concentrate disorder and others disperse it - but they have same goal: to relocate …

Ordering (And Order In) The City, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Over the past two decades, the broken windows hypothesis by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson has revolutionized thinking about urban policy. This now-familiar theory is that uncorrected manifestations of disorder, even minor ones like broken windows, signal a breakdown in the social order that accelerates neighborhood decline. The response to this theory has been a proliferation of policies focusing on public order. Largely missing from the academic debate about these developments is a discussion of the complex and important role of property regulation in order-maintenance efforts. This Article attempts to fill that property law gap in the public-order puzzle …

The Public-Use Question As A Takings Problem, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Government officials regularly use the power of eminent domain to benefit private entities, and just as regularly justify their actions with post hoc assertions about the need to promote economic development. In Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Fifth Amendment demands broad deference to a government's decision to exercise the power of eminent domain. Midkiff makes clear that public use challenges are subject to rational basis review; so long as a taking can be justified by some conceivable public purpose, it will be upheld. Yet in recent years, a number of courts have put the …

On Castles And Commerce: Zoning Law And The Home Business Dilemma, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Most zoning laws severely restrict residents' ability to work from home. Some prohibit it outright. These regulations serve the ostensible purpose of protecting neighbors from externalities that might be generated by home businesses. But, home occupation restrictions also reflect in a particularly sharp way the central motivating ideology underlying all zoning laws - namely, that the good life requires the careful segregation of work and home. Today, home business regulations are being challenged by both planning theory and economic reality. At the same time that many in the academy and planning professions are calling into question zoning's pervasive segregation of …

Trouble Preserving Paradise?, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Election day 2000 was not a good day for proponents of suburban growth controls. The overwhelming initial support for initiatives that proposed state-wide growth management plans in Colorado and Arizona withered in the face of vigorous opposition campaigns. And, pro-planning forces in Oregon woke up on Wednesday morning to learn that voters had approved a little-noticed initiative amending the state constitution to require compensation for partial takings - that is, for any reduction in the fair market value of property resulting from government regulation - thus throwing into question the future of the State's widely touted model controlled-growth scheme.

These …

Incorporation Of "Private" Environmental Certification Systems In Formal Legal Systems: The U.S. Case., Errol E. Meidinger

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Article 27 And Mexican Land Reform: The Legacy Of Zapata's Dream, James J. Kelly

Journal Articles

This student note takes an historical look at indigenous land tenure in Mexico and the role that limited alienability has played in sustaining indigenous agriculture from the time of the Aztecs up until the reforms enacted by the Salinas administration in Mexico in the early 1990's. As the piece was in edits, the Zapatista rebellion broke out and the text was amended to note the role that land tenure played in the uprising.

The "Public Uses" Of Eminent Domain: History And Policy, Errol E. Meidinger

Journal Articles

This paper examines the effects and implications of the ‘public use’ requirement for the exercise of eminent domain in the United States. It is part of an ongoing inquiry the consequences of eminent domain in the United States. The first part examines the history of the public use requirement, both how the doctrine has been articulated and logically extended and what purposes have been accomplished under it. The second part of the paper is an analytic critique of the public use doctrine. After considering whether any principled standard can be developed to delimit the proper uses of eminent domain, it …

A Brief Inquiry Into The Imperatives Of The Coastal Zone And The Processes Of Institutional Change . . . ., Robert I. Reis

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Policy And Planning For Recreational Use Of Inland Waters, Robert I. Reis

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

A Review And Revitalization: Concepts For Ground Water Production And Management—The California Experience, Robert I. Reis

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Legal Planning For Ground Water Production, Robert I. Reis

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Determinable Fees, Effect Of Failure In Deed To Provide For Forfeiture Or Reversion, Joseph O'Meara

Journal Articles

The case of In re Matter of Copps Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church appears to establish that there is no longer any such thing as a determinable interest in land in Ohio. There would seem to be no escape from this unless the court should be prepared to overrule itself.

Legal Status Of The Spite Fence In Ohio, Joseph O'Meara, Herman W. Santen

Journal Articles

It is generally assumed, on the authority of Letts v. Kessler, that spite fences in Ohio are within the law. In two cases language has been used indicating an adherence to the obsolescent view that spite fences may be erected with impunity, but in neither case was the question before the court for decision, so that what was said must be classed as dicta. This, then is the situation: there is not a single decision in the last twenty-one years supporting the rule of Letts v. Kessler. A careful reading of the opinion in Letts v. Kessler will show that …