Law Commons^™

Natural Law, Assumptions, And Humility, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This review of Natural Property Rights celebrates Eric Claeys’s efforts to resuscitate natural law as a viable approach to property law. Although readers unlikely to be convinced that natural law is the way to best understand property rights, Claeys succeeds in breathing new life into natural law. Natural Property Rights’ emphasis on use as property law’s fundamental value creates space to reconceptualize the rights of property owners and the place of non-owners within a just theory of property rights. The main critiques of Natural Property Rights offered in this review center around the choice to prioritize rights over duties and …

Affirmatively Resisting, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article argues that administrative processes, in particular rulemaking’s notice-and-comment requirement, enable local institutions to fight back against federal deregulatory efforts. Federalism all the way down means that state and local officials can dissent from within when challenging federal action. Drawing upon the ways in which localities, states, public housing authorities, and fair housing nonprofits resisted the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back federal fair housing enforcement, this Article shows how uncooperative federalism works in practice.

Despite the fact that the 1968 Fair Housing Act requires that the federal government affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH), the requirement was largely ignored …

A Critical Jeffersonian Mind For A Community Reinvestment Bind, Chaz Brooks

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ("CRA") primarily sought to remedy decades of government sanctioned disinvestment in so-called “redlined communities.” Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and later the Federal Housing Administration, the United States of America created from whole cloth a structure that encouraged and subsidized the explosion of homeownership in white American households. Following decades of racialized wealth generation, the United States had a change of heart. Congress determined that financiers needed a gentle push to invest fairly. Additionally, Congress wanted one thing clear in the drafting of this remedy—it must not allocate credit.

This essay considers how …

Corporate Consolidation Of Rental Housing & The Case For National Rent Stabilization, Brandon Weiss

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Rental housing in the United States is increasingly owned by corporate landlords that operate under a different set of incentives, behind a level of anonymity previously unavailable, and pursuant to practices that often exacerbate an already precarious housing landscape for tenants. Marketsensitive and nuanced rent stabilization laws have reemerged at the state and local level as a viable policy option to help regulate escalating rents and prevent tenant displacement. These laws, when well drafted, can address outdated critiques of strict rent caps and can complement alternative approaches, like those of the politically popular Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, which …