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Full-Text Articles in Law
In Defense Of The Fee Simple, Katrina M. Wyman
In Defense Of The Fee Simple, Katrina M. Wyman
Notre Dame Law Review
Prominent economically oriented legal academics are currently arguing that the fee simple, the dominant form of private landownership in the United States, is an inefficient way for society to allocate land. They maintain that the fee simple blocks transfers of land to higher value uses because it provides property owners with a perpetual monopoly. The critics propose that landownership be reformulated to enable private actors to forcibly purchase land from other private owners, similar to the way that governments can expropriate land for public uses using eminent domain. While recognizing the significance of the critique, this Article takes issue with …
Penn Central Take Two, Christopher Serkin
Penn Central Take Two, Christopher Serkin
Notre Dame Law Review
Penn Central v. New York City is the most important regulatory takings case of all time. There, the Supreme Court upheld the historic preservation of Grand Central Terminal in part because the City offset the burden of the landmarking with a valuable new property interest—a transferable development right (TDR)—that could be sold to neighboring property. Extraordinarily, 1.2 million square feet of those very same TDRs, still unused for over forty years, are the subject of newly resolved takings litigation. According to the complaint, the TDRs that saved Grand Central were themselves taken by the government, which allegedly wiped out their …