Law Commons^™

Rural Bashing, Kaceylee Klein, Lisa R. Pruitt

University of Richmond Law Review

Anti-rural sentiment is expressed in the United States in three major threads. The first is a narrative about the political structure of our representative democracy—an assertion that rural people are over-represented thanks to the structural features of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. Because rural residents are less than a fifth of the U.S. population, complaints about this situation are often framed as “minority rule.”

The second thread is related to the first: rural people and their communities get more than their fair share from federal government coffers. The argument, often expressed in terms of “subsidies,” is that rural …

Rural America As A Commons, Ann M. Eisenberg

University of Richmond Law Review

With many ready to dismiss non-urban life as a relic of history, rural America’s place in the future is in question. The rural role in the American past is understandably more apparent. As the story of urbanization goes in the United States and elsewhere, the majority of the population used to live in rural places, including small towns and sparsely populated counties. A substantial proportion of those people worked in agriculture, manufacturing, or extractive industries. But trends associated with modernity—mechanization, automation, globalization, and environmental conservation, for instance—have reduced the perceived need for a rural workforce. Roughly since the industrial revolution …

With A Wink And A Nod: How Politicians, Regulators, And Corrupt Coal Companies Exploited Appalachia, Patrick C. Mcginley

University of Richmond Law Review

Environmental regulators treated America’s leading coal companies like Wall Street’s mismanaged banks leading to the “Great Recession”—big coal companies that produced millions of tons of coal were simply too big to fail. With a wink and a nod, federal and state regulators ignored a core provision of federal law that was intended to prevent coal companies from continuing their past practices of plundering Appalachia’s mineral wealth while ravaging her environment.

This Article examines how the coal industry successfully evaded compliance with that law. The consequences of this evasion include mass bankruptcies, thousands of acres of mined land laying unclaimed, …

Land Use And Zoning Law, Philip Carter Strother, Andrew E. Tarne

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Land Use And Zoning Law: The Current Lay Of The Land, Philip C. Strother, Matthew R. Farley

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Real Estate Law, Paul H. Davenport, Lindsey H. Dobbs

University of Richmond Law Review

This article surveys significant cases concerning real property law decided by the Supreme Court of Virginia between the spring of 2004 and the spring of 2006. This article also details significant legislative changes flowing from the 2005 and 2006 Virginia General Assembly sessions.

Amending Perpetual Conservation Easements: A Case Study Of The Myrtle Grove Controversy, Nancy A. Mclaughlin

University of Richmond Law Review

This article explores the issue of amending perpetual conservation easements by examining the Myrtle Grove controversy, in which the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States (the "National Trust")" "conceptually approved" a request made by a successor owner of land encumbered by a perpetual conservation easement to substantially amend the easement. Several months later, as a result of public opposition to the amendments and a reassessment of its position, the National Trust withdrew that approval. The owner of the encumbered land subsequently filed a suit for breach of contract, and the National Trust and the Attorney General of …

Real Estate And Land Use Law, Brian R. Marron

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Real Estate Law, Brian R. Marron, Christopher M. Gill

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Environmental Law, Lisa Spickler Goodwin

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Real Estate And Land Use Law, John V. Cogbill Iii, D. Brennen Keene

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Dialogue On Design, William A. Mcdonough

University of Richmond Law Review

This is an interview in the Allen Chair Symposium.

The Twilight Of Land-Use Controls: A Paradigm Shift?, Charles M. Haar

University of Richmond Law Review

The subject chosen for this discussion is both timely and thought-provoking: the status and future of land-use regulations in the United States. In the hope of making the issues subsumed under this title as exciting to the general public as they are to the practitioners, Professor Michael Allan Wolf has taken the monumental Euclid decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1926 as the pivot of our deliberations. He has posed the question most dramatically with overtones of a swelling Wagnerian overture: "Is It The Twilight of Environmental and Land-Use Regulation?"

Life, Liberty & Whose Property?: An Essay On Property Rights, Loren A. Smith

University of Richmond Law Review

This essay explores the place that the concept of property rights occupies in our constitutional system. The word "property" has been used in a number of ways in the history of our Republic.

Takings In The Court Of Federal Claims: Does The Court Make Takings Policy In Hage?, Danielle M. Stager

University of Richmond Law Review

In the eleven western states, almost half of the land is federally owned and a large percentage of that federal land is used for grazing privately-owned domestic livestock. The Department of the Interior estimates that permitted grazing occurs on thirty-six percent of federal land, but this percentage is much higher in the areas containing more federal rangeland. In 1990, the eleven western states had approximately seventeen million beef cattle and 102,800 beef producers. Roughly eighteen percent of those beef producers had federal grazing permits, but in some states that percentage was much higher. For example, eighty-eight percent of the cattle …

Transportation Conformity And Land-Use Planning: Understanding The Inconsistencies, D. Brennen Keene

University of Richmond Law Review

Since the boom of federal environmental laws in the early 1970s, Congress, federal administrative agencies, and the states have grappled with how best to obtain the lofty goals of these laws. As evidence of this struggle, Congress has made substantial amendments to several major environmental laws on one or more occasions in order to achieve these goals, and the states have followed suit in order to keep pace with the changes on the federal level. The resulting mass of state and federal environmental laws and regulations has led to a series of complex, and often confusing, layers of laws and …

Suburbs Under Siege: Race, Space And Audacious Judges, Abigail T. Baker

University of Richmond Law Review

Across the United States, cities are witnessing a mass exodus into the suburbs with increasing frequency. The prestige that once attached to urbanites is now equated with these "new suburbanites." Claiming better schools, safer neighborhoods and overall peace of mind, the new suburbanites have been the pied-piper to thousands of other city dwellers. By and large, those that have been able to afford to move out of the cities are white, middle-class Americans.6 Local exclusionary zoning, by permitting only certain types of homes to be built in a specific area, has rendered the American dream-owning a home in suburbia-unattainable for …

Capture And Counteraction: Self-Help By Environmental Zealots, James E. Krier

University of Richmond Law Review

Self-help is a largely neglected topic in American legal studies. With the exception of a survey by a group of law students published a dozen years ago, there appears to be little, if anything, in our legal literature that confronts the subject in a systematic way. This is so, at least, if one defines self-help as I do. To me, the term refers to any act of bypassing the formal legal system in order to get what one wants.