Law Commons^™

Cities And Citizens Seethe: A Case Study Of Local Efforts To Influence Natural Gas Pipeline Routing Decisions, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article explores the reasons local governments find difficulty influencing pipeline-routing decisions. For example, federal law controls interstate natural gas pipeline permitting, which is complicated and inaccessible. State law, particularly in Ohio, heavily favors utilities, in part by preempting local efforts to make local decisions regarding oil and gas development. Finally, the information gaps are enormous between what local governments need to influence pipeline-routing decisions and what is accessible.

This Article addresses barriers to local influence by discussing the efforts of citizens and local governments to influence the routing of NexusSpectra's natural gas transmission pipeline, which was recently constructed and …

Crime And Punishment In Gold Country : A Historical Case-Study, Shih-Chun Steven Chien, Lawrence M. Friedman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Rural life, small town life, is not and has never been idyllic. It has always had its share of pathology, sometimes deep pathology. Small town life is not necessarily traditional life, close-knit family life, neighborly life. That kind of life certainly exists; but America was never a traditional society in that sense. Its small towns were full of strangers. The population of El Dorado County, small as it was, had been growing rapidly. Like America in general, El Dorado County had its share of anomie; rootless men (and women), without strong relationships: ships without anchors, driftwood on the sea of …

Get Out From Under My Land! Hydraulic Fracturing, Forced Pooling Or Unitization, And The Role Of The Dissenting Landowner, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article addresses the legal circumstances arising when a state agency authorizes oil and gas production operations beneath a landowner’s land against that landowner’s wishes. One might assume that, if a landowner wants to preserve his or her land from oil and gas development, the landowner could simply refuse to allow drilling to occur beneath the land. However, neighbors may want to develop the oil and gas resources beneath their own land. To satisfy the neighbors’ wishes, an oil and gas producer must assemble mineral production rights on or beneath enough contiguous land to satisfy state spacing and acreage requirements …

Citizens, Town Councils, And Landowners: The Complex Web Of Rights And Decision-Making In Shale Oil And Gas Development, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Robertson's piece focuses on the role of local governments operating within a larger legal system and how they might control or influence shale oil and gas activities within their communities.

Talking Foreign Policy: Art, Diplomacy And Accountability, Milena Sterio, Mark Ellis, Shannon French, Bill Schabas, Paul R. Williams, Michael P. Scharf

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Talking Foreign Policy is a one-hour radio program, hosted by Case Western Reserve University School of Law Co-Dean Michael Scharf, in which experts discuss the salient foreign policy issues of the day. Dean Scharf created Talking Foreign Policy to break down complex foreign policy topics that are prominent in the day-to-day news cycles yet difficult to understand.

This broadcast featured:

• Paul R. Williams, President and cofounder of the Public International Law & Policy Group, who has advised parties to treaty negotiations around the world
• Mark Ellis, Executive Director of the International Bar Association
• Bill Schabas, a professor at Middlesex University …

Data-Driven Systems: Model Practices & Policies For Strategic Code Enforcement, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This brief examines the latest strategies, tools, and techniques for using real property data to help communities facilitate neighborhood revitalization through a strategic, data-driven approach to code enforcement policies, programs, and tactics.

"You Belong To Me": Unscrambling The Legal Ramifications Of Recognizing A Property Right In Frozen Human Eggs, Browne C. Lewis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article is divided into four parts. Part I includes a discussion of just a few examples of when babies conceived as a result of surrogacy arrangements have been treated like personal property. Part II explains the process that makes human oocyte cryopreservation a viable option for young women and also explores the ways that human eggs may end up in the marketplace. Part III examines the options open to courts with regard to the extent of a woman's property interest in her frozen eggs. Part IV contains an analysis of some of the property law causes of action that …

Evictions, Aspiration And Avoidance, Brian E. Ray

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In December 2011 four of the Constitutional Court’s five socio-economic rights cases turned on evictions.2 The Court decided three eviction-related cases in the 2012 term and two more in 2013.3 For a Court that averages fewer than 30 decisions per term 10 decisions in less than two and a half years is an extraordinary level of attention devoted to a single area of constitutional law.4 Does this sustained attention to eviction cases harbinger a significant development in the Court’s approach to the right to housing in FC s 26 and to socio-economic rights more generally? The cases provide some evidence …

Courts, Capacity And Engagement: Lessons From Hlophe V. City Of Johannesburg, Brian E. Ray

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The case was one of the first applying the Constitutional Court’s holding in City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality v Blue Moonlight Properties 39 (Pty) Ltd and Another, (2) BCLR 150 (CC) (1 December 2011) (Blue Moonlight) that municipalities have an independent obligation to plan and budget for the emergency accommodation needs of people evicted from private property. The City also was the defendant in that case, and so its repeated failures to accommodate the occupants in Hlophe demonstrated a broader failure to implement the planning, budget and policy requirements that flowed from Blue Moonlight. Judge Satchwell recognised this and issued …

The People's Court, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Cleveland Housing Court adjudicates only one house and one owner at a time, while the investors and speculators in blighted properties operate in secret at high volume from a distance. However, the court's focus on housing code compliance and its (when needed) willingness to hand down strong measures is powerful. Even now, the City of Cleveland is implementing new strategic code compliance measures in partnership with neighborhood-based community development corporations, to the point where there is less profit in owning worthless houses in Cleveland, and the court is redirecting the disposal of low-value foreclosed houses to local land banks …

Can Public Nuisance Law Protect Your Neighborhood From Big Banks?, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article considers how the law of public nuisance might be applied to protect neighborhoods from the destructive forces of the mortgage crisis. For more than thirty years I have been a close observer and a participant in community development at the neighborhood level in Cleveland, Ohio. I now supervise a law school clinical practice that provides legal counsel to an array of nonprofit community development corporations that, for more than thirty-five years, have been renewing housing and neighborhood sustainability in a city going through major social and economic change.

Justice John Paul Stevens - His Take On Takings, Alan C. Weinstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This commentary reviews and analyzes Justice John Paul Stevens's role in shaping the Court's views on the takings issue in land use regulation.

Children Of Men: Balancing The Inheritance Rights Of Marital And Non-Marital Children, Browne C. Lewis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Average U.S. citizens are routinely having children out of wedlock. In America, at least one out of every three babies born is a non-marital child. As more and more children continue to be born out of wedlock, society must enact laws to protect the interests of those children. They are the children of men and they are entitled to financial support both during the lives and after the deaths of their parents.

Part II of this article briefly discusses the historical treatment of non-marital children. Part Ill explores the modem legal treatment of non-marital children, which consists of three distinct …

Propertization, Contract, Competition, And Communication: Law's Struggle To Adapt To The Transformative Powers Of The Internet, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Symposium focuses in part on the ideas of Margaret Radin as a point of departure for the various contributions. A key part of the analysis includes the process she calls propertization in the context of intellectual property rules and the Internet. The approach taken in this introductory essay is twofold. The first part presents some key points raised by the Symposium contributors. Of course, that overview is necessarily incomplete, because the contributions represent a rich group of analyses about vital concerns relating to how our legal system should respond to the challenge of the Internet and information systems through …

The Stolen Museum: Have United States Art Museums Become Inadvertent Fences For Stolen Art Works Looted By The Nazis In Word War Ii?, Barbara Tyler

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article begins with some historical background surrounding the Nazi pillaging of several family collections which may have found their way into American museums. The Article then focuses on what legal and equitable doctrines should be employed in the search for justice in ownership of art works in the United States. The Article advocates that American lawmust prevail. It must be modified to reject the due diligence rule for replevin. Replevin maintains that good intentions alone cannot abrogate the doctrine of bona fide purchaser: a thief can never pass clear title to stolen property to any subsequent transferee no matter …

An Implied Cause Of Action Under The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Note contends that consumers should have a private damages action under section 10. Part I discusses the method federal courts currently employ to determine whether a private cause of action should be recognized under a given federal statute. Part II applies this standard to section 10, and it argues that, although the federal courts currently exhibit a fairly restrictive attitude toward implication of remedies, an action should be implied under section 10 because the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act of 1974 (RESPA) was enacted at a time when Congress relied on a more permissive judicial implication doctrine. Finally, Part …

Egyptian Land Law: An Evaluation, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In all cases, the country adopting the Western code has attempted to infuse it with traditional values or with tenets of a particular ideology. Frequently, the inevitable dichotomy between the basic concepts of the code and the values which have been infused into it produce legal tensions. This has certainly been the case in Egypt. Traditionally, Egypt has had difficulty accommodating a growing population on a limited amount of arable land. Whether Egypt is able to remedy past maldistribution of arable land will have significant social, economic and political consequences. The success of legal reform in Egypt must be judged …