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Full-Text Articles in Law

Resetting The Baseline Of Ownership: Takings And Investor Expectations After The Bailouts, Nestor M. Davidson Jan 2016

Resetting The Baseline Of Ownership: Takings And Investor Expectations After The Bailouts, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

During the economic crisis that began in 2008, the federal government nationalized several of the nation’s most significant private companies as part of a broad effort to forestall a global depression. Shareholders in those companies later filed suit, alleging that the federal government in so doing—and in subsequent actions while in control of the firms—took their property without compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment. To date, those claims have not succeeded. If these cases continue on their current trajectory, with courts rejecting arguments that the rescue of systematically important firms on the brink of collapse requires compensation for shareholders, …


New Formalism In The Aftermath Of The Housing Crisis, Nestor M. Davidson Jan 2013

New Formalism In The Aftermath Of The Housing Crisis, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

The housing crisis has left in its wake an ongoing legal crisis. After housing markets began to collapse across the country in 2007, foreclosures and housing-related bankruptcies surged significantly and have barely begun to abate more than six years later. As the legal system has confronted this aftermath, courts have increasingly accepted claims by borrowers that lenders and other entities involved in securitizing mortgages failed to follow requirements related to perfecting and transferring their security interests. These cases – which focus variously on issues such as standing, real party in interest, chains of assignment, the negotiability of mortgage notes, and …


Property's Morale , Nestor M. Davidson Jan 2011

Property's Morale , Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

A foundational argument long invoked to justify stable property rights is that property law must protect settled expectations. Respect for expectations unites otherwise disparate strands of property theory focused on ex ante incentives, individual identity, and community. It also privileges resistance to legal transitions that transgress reliance interests. When changes in law unsettle expectations, such changes are thought to generate disincentives that Frank Michelman famously labeled demoralization costs. Although rarely approached in these terms, arguments for legal certainty reflect underlying psychological assumptions about how people contemplate property rights when choosing whether and how to work, invest, create, bolster identity, join …


Judicial Takings And State Action: Rereading Shelley After Stop The Beach Renourishment The Very Idea Of Judicial Takings, Nestor M. Davidson Jan 2011

Judicial Takings And State Action: Rereading Shelley After Stop The Beach Renourishment The Very Idea Of Judicial Takings, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

When the Supreme Court recently dipped its toe into longstanding debates about judicial takings in Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the intimation that the Court might finally recognize the doctrine generated a wave of responses. Commentators concerned with the expansion of regulatory takings jurisprudence argued that it would be unwise to apply the Takings Clause to the judiciary; those inclined to defend a more vigorous application of the Clause, perhaps not surprisingly, saw a promising new avenue of vindication. It would be naive to argue that the Stop the Beach Renourishment plurality's logic could-or …


Collective Action And The Urban Commons, Sheila R. Foster Jan 2011

Collective Action And The Urban Commons, Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

Urban residents share access to a number of local resources in which they have a common stake. These resources range from local streets and parks to public spaces to a variety of shared neighborhood amenities. Collectively shared urban resources suffer from the same rivalry and free-riding problems that Garrett Hardin described in his Tragedy of the Commons tale. Scholars have not yet worked up a theory about how this tragedy unfolds in the urban context, particularly in light of existing government regulation and control of common urban resources. This Article argues that the tragedy of the urban commons unfolds during …


Forced Eviction And Resettlement In Cambodia: Case Studies From Phnom Penh, Chi Adanna Mgbako, Rijie Ernie Gao, Elizabeth Joynes, Anna Cave, Jessica Mikhailevich Jan 2010

Forced Eviction And Resettlement In Cambodia: Case Studies From Phnom Penh, Chi Adanna Mgbako, Rijie Ernie Gao, Elizabeth Joynes, Anna Cave, Jessica Mikhailevich

Faculty Scholarship

This Article culminates a project undertaken by the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic (“Leitner Clinic”) at Fordham Law School to examine the effects of land resettlement on communities that were forcibly evicted or are at risk of forced eviction from their homes, and, in particular, the effects of forced evictions on the Boeung Kak Lake community in central Phnom Penh and on people living with HIV/AIDS (“PLWHA”). This Article is based on field research the Leitner Clinic conducted in Cambodia in the fall of 2008. While in Cambodia, the Leitner Clinic interviewed families from four different communities: resettlement camps …


Lifting The Museum's Burden From The Backs Of The University: Should The Art Collection Be Treated As Part Of The Endowment Symposium: Tax-Exempt Organizations And The State: New Conditions On Exempt Status, Linda Sugin Jan 2009

Lifting The Museum's Burden From The Backs Of The University: Should The Art Collection Be Treated As Part Of The Endowment Symposium: Tax-Exempt Organizations And The State: New Conditions On Exempt Status, Linda Sugin

Faculty Scholarship

A few universities in economic straits have recently attempted to sell artwork to address their financial woes, causing much consternation in the museum community. This Article relates the stories of some institutions' attempts to deaccession artworks, and explains why universities may suddenly perceive their art collections as important assets to monetize. It contends that the universities and their critics have fundamentally divergent conceptions of the role of the art collection in the university, which explains why they cannot agree on the legal responsibilities of universities vis-a-vis their art. The critics have a strong cultural-property conception that privileges art, while these …


Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink Jan 2008

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family …


In Defense Of Property , Kristen A. Carpenter, Sonia K. Katyal, Angela R. Riley Jan 2008

In Defense Of Property , Kristen A. Carpenter, Sonia K. Katyal, Angela R. Riley

Faculty Scholarship

This Article responds to an emerging view, in scholarship and popular society, that it is normatively undesirable to employ property law as a means of protecting indigenous cultural heritage. Recent critiques suggest that propertizing culture impedes the free flow of ideas, speech, and perhaps culture itself. In our view, these critiques arise largely because commentators associate "property" with a narrow model of individual ownership that reflects neither the substance of indigenous cultural property claims nor major theoretical developments in the broader field of property law. Thus, departing from the individual rights paradigm, our Article situates indigenous cultural property claims, particularly …


Standardization And Pluralism In Property Law , Nestor M. Davidson Jan 2008

Standardization And Pluralism In Property Law , Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

At the heart of contemporary property theory stands an intriguing puzzle. Unlike the relatively unconstrained freedom that contract law provides for private ordering, property law recognizes only a limited and standard list of mandatory forms. This standardization-known as the numerus clausus from the civil law concept that the "number is closed" -poses a basic conundrum: what can explain a persistent feature of the law that seems, at first glance, so clearly to restrict the autonomy and efficiency gains conventionally associated with private property? This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I describes the numerus clausus principle and the problems that …


Property And Relative Status , Nestor M. Davidson Jan 2008

Property And Relative Status , Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

Property does many things-it incentivizes productive activity, facilitates exchange, forms an integral part of individual identity, and shapes communities. But property does something equally fundamental: it communicates. And perhaps the most ubiquitous and important messages that property communicates have to do with relative status, with the material world defining and reinforcing a variety of economic, social, and cultural hierarchies. This status-signaling function of property-with property serving as an important locus for symbolic meaning through which people compare themselves to others-complicates premises underlying central discourses in contemporary property theory. In particular, status signaling can skew property's incentive and allocative benefits, leading …


Property Outlaws, Eduardo Moises Peñalver, Sonia K. Katyal Jan 2007

Property Outlaws, Eduardo Moises Peñalver, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

Most people do not hold those who intentionally flout property laws in particularly high regard. The overridingly negative view of the property lawbreaker as a "wrongdoer" comports with the status of property rights within our characteristically individualist, capitalist, political culture. This reflexively dim view of property lawbreakers is also shared, to a large degree, by property theorists, many of whom regard property rights as a relatively fixed constellation of entitlements that collectively produce stability and efficiency through an orderly system of ownership. In this Article, Professors Peihalver and Katyal seek partially to rehabilitate the reviled character of the intentional property …


The Property Of Death, Tanya K. Hernandez Jan 1998

The Property Of Death, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

Who owns death and why do we care? The question of who owns death is implicitly deliberated each time a legal dispute ensues over who can direct the manner of a decedent's burial. There is no definitive legal rule as to who has the right to control the disposal of mortal remains because there is no agreement as to who owns a body after death or whether the cadaver is subject to traditional property rights. Although most states have probate laws and health codes which authorize a decedent (or in the alternative, a priority list of family members) to direct …