Law Commons^™

Community In Property: Lessons From Tiny Homes Villages, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

The evolving role of community in property law remains undertheorized. While legal scholars have analyzed the commons, common interest communities, and aspects of the sharing economy, the recent rise of intentional co-housing communities re-mains relatively understudied. This Article analyzes tiny homes villages for unhoused people in the United States, as examples of co-housing communities that create a new housing tenure—stewardship—and demonstrate the growing importance of community, co-management, sustainability, and flexibility in con-temporary property law. These villages’ property relationships challenge the predominance of individualized, exclusionary, long-term, fee simple ownership in contemporary property law and exemplify property theories such as progressive property …

Perpetual Affordability Covenants: Can These Land Use Tools Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis?, Elizabeth Elia

Faculty Scholarship

Approximately 3.8 million privately-owned residential housing units in America today contain affordability covenants recorded in their chains of title. State and local agencies and the District of Columbia use these covenants to ensure that publicly-subsidized properties are actually used to provide affordable housing. With rents at all-time highs and stagnant wages, the affordable housing crisis has reached a fever pitch. House Democrats are proposing billions more in housing subsidy. To the extent those funds subsidize privately-owned housing development they, too, will be secured by affordability covenants. In response to this crisis, a new trend in high cost markets is to …

The State Of Exactions, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

In Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, the Supreme Court slightly expanded the range of circumstances involving conditional land use permits in which heightened judicial scrutiny is appropriate in a constitutional “exaction” takings case. In crafting a vision of regulators as strategic extortionists of private property interests, though, Koontz prompted many takings observers to predict that the case would provide momentum for a more significant expansion of such scrutiny in takings cases involving land use permit conditions moving forward, and perhaps even an extension into other regulatory contexts, as well.

Five years on, this Article evaluates the extent …

Historic Partition Law Reform: A Game Changer For Heirs’ Property Owners, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Over the course of several decades, many disadvantaged families who owned property under the tenancy-in-common form of ownership—property these families often referred to as heirs’ property—have had their property forcibly sold as a result of court-ordered partition sales. For several decades, repeated efforts to reform State partition laws produced little to no reform despite clear evidence that these laws unjustly harmed many families. This paper addresses the remarkable success of a model State statute named the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), which has been enacted into law in several States since 2011, including in five southern States. The …

Financing The American Dream, David Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From Nuisance To Environmental Protection In Continental Europe, Vanessa Casado-Pérez, Carlos Gomez Liguerre

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the evolution and complexity of the legal response to neighboring conflicts in European civil law countries. All of the civil codes analyzed (France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and Catalonia) are based on Roman Law rules that are not always clear. The fuzziness of those Roman Law rules explains, in part, why despite this common origin, the Civil Codes did not respond homogeneously to nuisances. The first subsection briefly describes the institution of nuisance in Roman Law. Then, the paper describes the original codification of nuisance and the changes in the treatment of this institution. After assessing the initial …

Uncompensated Takings: Insurance, Efficiency, And Relational Justice, Brian Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Uncompensated Takings: Insurance, Efficiency, And Relational Justice, Brian Angelo Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Specialization Trend: Water Courts, Vanessa Casado-Pérez

Faculty Scholarship

Definition of property rights is not useful unless there is an enforcement system, either public or private, that backs it up. While the definition of property rights as a solution to the tragedy of the commons has been carefully analyzed in the literature, the enforcement piece has been somewhat overlooked. Water is becoming scarcer and conflict is rising. As a result, the need for an efficient and fair enforcement system is more necessary than ever due to climate change.

Given the complexity of water law and the backlog in the judicial system, introducing specialization in the resolution of water cases …

The Street View Of Property, Vanessa Casado-Pérez

Faculty Scholarship

Parking on public streets is scarce. The current allocation system for parking spots based on rule of capture coupled with low parking fees creates a tragedy of the commons scenario. The misallocation of parking has consequences for commerce, for access to public spaces, and for pollution and congestion. Municipalities have not widely adopted the solution that economists propose to solve this scarcity problem: increase the price. Politics aside, the reluctance of municipalities to do so may be explained by the unique nature of public property as reflected in well-rooted legal and societal constraints. This unique nature helps explain, for example, …

I Promise To Pay, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

Consumers are more likely to keep a repayment promise they make themselves. When a scheduling conflict prevents a borrower from attending a mortgage closing, a power of attorney (POA) empowers a third party to promise that the borrower will repay the loan. On a matched sample of POA and non-POA loans, and comparing within borrower and within property, I link POAs to greater delinquency and foreclosure. Although POAs are uncorrelated with cash flow shocks, they reflect reduced promise keeping when borrowers undergo financial distress. This association vanishes for originator-servicers’ loans, which suggests that financial intermediation plays a role in consumer …

Choice Of Law In Takings Cases, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers what law should apply in resolving subsidiary questions that arise in the course of deciding takings cases under federal constitutional law. It argues that there are three choices: federal constitutional law, state law, or a federal-patterning definition that lays down certain general parameters as a matter of federal constitutional law but otherwise follows state law if it is consistent with these parameters. The article illustrates these choices by considering a recent Supreme Court decision, Murr v. Wisconsin, which held that the horizontal dimensions of a “parcel of land” should be determined, for takings purposes, as a …

Empowering The Poor: Turning De Facto Rights Into Collateralized Credit, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

The shrinking middle class and the widening gap between the rich and the poor constitute significant threats to social and financial stability. One of the main impediments to upward mobility is the inability of economically disadvantaged people to use their property — in which they sometimes hold only de facto, not de jure, rights — as collateral to obtain credit. This Article argues that commercial law should recognize those de facto rights, enabling the poor to borrow to start businesses or otherwise create wealth. Recognition not only would provide benefits that exceed its costs; it also would be consistent with, …

Expropriation In The Name Of Rights: Transferable Development Rights (Tdrs), The Bundle Of Sticks And Chinese Politics, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

Through an in-depth empirical investigation, this article discloses for the first time how and why land reform programs in the name of empowering and enriching farmers have been serving the purpose of Chinese local governments to compromise the rights revolution in the Chinese national expropriation regime. The concept of “transferable development rights” (TDRs) is simple: development rights from one parcel of land are lifted up and transferred to another. Upon a detailed examination of land tickets in Chongqing and Chengdu, the southwestern Chinese application of TDRs, this article reveals that local governments in both cities have created schemes of land …

The Architecture Of Property, Thomas W. Merrill, Henry E. Smith

Faculty Scholarship

Avoiding the reduction of property to a bundle or rights or to the working out of a single master principle, the architectural theory of property sees property as an integrated system or structure anchored in certain unifying principles. Because our world is neither chaotic nor additiviely simple, property law and institutions must achieve their plural ends in a fashion that manages the inherent complexity of the interaction of valued resource attributes and human actions. In managing complexity, some of the law’s structures receive functional explanations and justifications, which can be different from the explanations and justifications that apply to the …

Divergence And Convergence At The Intersection Of Property And Contract, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Carmine Guerriero

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we study rules that solve the conflict between the original owner and an innocent buyer of a stolen or embezzled good. These rules balance the protection of the original owner’s property and the buyer’s reliance on contractual exchange, thereby addressing a fundamental legal and economic trade-off. Our analysis is based on a unique, hand-collected dataset on the rules in force in 126 countries. Using this data, we document and explain two conflicting trends. There is a large amount of first-order divergence: both rules that apply to stolen goods and those that apply to embezzled goods vary widely …