Law Commons^™

What Property Does, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law Review

For centuries, scholars have wrestled with seemingly intractable problems about the nature of property. This Article offers a different approach. Instead of asking what property is, it asks what property does. And it argues that property protects people’s reliance on resources by moderating the pace of change. Modern scholarly accounts emphasize voluntary transactions as the source and purpose of reliance in property. Such “transactional reliance” implies strong, stable, and enduring rights. This Article argues that property law also reflects a very different source of reliance on resources, one that rises and falls simply with the passage of time. This new …

Standardization And Pluralism In Property Law, Nestor M. Davidson

Vanderbilt Law Review

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 puzzle has garnered significant scholarly attention in recent years. Some scholars have argued that standardization, although paternalistic, …

The Law Of Last Resort, Barry E. Adler

Vanderbilt Law Review

A financially distressed individual or corporation employs the bankruptcy process only as a last resort. The study of bankruptcy law, however, need not, and should not, be an afterthought. The traditional bodies of law that compose private ordering are the laws of property, contract, and tort. Property law establishes private entitlements that can be specifically enforced against the world. Contract law permits individuals to exchange obligations and thus invest one another with entitlements. Tort law creates its own set of entitlements and imposes liability for unwanted interference with those or other entitlements. These bodies of law are often presented as …

The Nexus Of Federal And State Law In Railroad Abandonments, Marc A. Sennewald

Vanderbilt Law Review

The United States Congress embarked on a new era in the regulation of interstate commerce when it created the Interstate Commerce Commission ("ICC") in 1887 to regulate railroad traffic.' A major purpose of the ICC regulatory framework, as amended by the Transportation Act of 1920, was to preempt actions by state and local authorities that prevented railroads from abandoning unprofitable lines. When Congress passed the Transportation Act, 252,588 miles of track criss-crossed the United States; by 1990 the number of rail- way miles had decreased by almost half.

Although the relative ease with which railroads abandoned unprofitable lines augmented their …

Refining The Itemized Deduction For Home Property Tax Payments, J. B. Mccombs

Vanderbilt Law Review

By enacting a $1 million debt limit for deductible home mortgage interest in 1987,' Congress opened the way for a fresh inquiry into the home property tax deduction. Adoption of that debt limit reflects a major change in policy-a re-evaluation of the benefits and costs of subsidies to luxury housing.

At first glance a $1 million limit seems ridiculously high if the debt ceiling reflects a decision to stop subsidizing luxury housing. The debt ceiling, however, does not contain an inflation adjustment provision. Because such provisions are common in the Internal Revenue Code, the absence here must be by conscious …

The Law Of Easements And Licenses In Land: Book Review, R. H. Helmholz

Vanderbilt Law Review

A distinguished commentator, Professor A.W.B. Simpson, recently observed that the legal treatise seems to be going the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird.' To him, and indeed to other thoughtful ob-servers, the treatise's characteristic form appears to have outlived its natural span, or at least lost its reason for existence among serious academic writers. The treatise's focus on a particular and specialized area of the law and its inevitable concentration on the doctrinal analysis of appellate cases now appear quite out of date to these observers, something perhaps worthwhile in a simpler and more complacent era, but which …

Mining With Mr. Justice Holmes, E. F. Roberts

Vanderbilt Law Review

All of us are probably familiar with the notion that the owner of mineral rights may owe some duty of care to support the owner of the fee in his or her surface use of the land. This principle results in a binary system (the surface estate and the right of sup-port) that can be treated easily in tort law. In Pennsylvania the coal companies had owned vast areas of land. The companies had sold much of this land, reserving not only the coal, but "the right to. ..remove the same without incurring in any way liability for any damage …

Modern Property Law: Cases And Materials, Dale A. Whitman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Most book reviews attempt to analyze the subject matter of the book under review. Casebooks, however, serve different purposes than other books; they are teaching tools that are useful only in the hands of an effective teacher. The editors of Modern Property Law are law teachers, and so am I. The purpose of this book review is to offer, as a professor of law, a personal view of this property casebook and to consider how it would function in the classroom. I have not yet used the book in my own property course because at the time of this writing …

Loosening The Grip Of The Dead Hand: Shall We Abolish Legal Future Interests In Land?, C. Dent Bostick

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article is concerned with a dilemma in the law of Future Interests. The dilemma stems from the needs and demands of a modern society to convey land cleanly and quickly and from the desire of property owners, especially landowners, to direct from the grave the on-going disposition of their property. This desire of landowners has always played a role in English and American property law. Much of the energy of the early judiciary was devoted to counter balancing the numerous ingenious arrangements devised by persons to effectuate continual control of their property.

Alienability Of Future Interests In Tennessee, Ernest C. Matthews, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

One of the most technical problems in the field of property law is the manner in which future interests in realty and personalty may be alienated. The term, future interest, is used here to mean a presently existing interest which is deprived of possession but which looks forward to possession in the future. The term is a misnomer. Such an interest is "future" only in the sense that it looks toward becoming possessory in the future. Just as future interests is a law of words, so the alienability of future interests is, in the absence of statute, a law of …

The Constitutionality Of The New Federal Estate Tax Definition Of A Transfer Taking Effect At Death, Charles L.B. Lowndes

Vanderbilt Law Review

The manifest reluctance in recent years on the part of the Supreme Court to declare any provision of the Federal Estate Tax unconstitutional may have given rise to the assumption that there are no constitutional limitations on the transfers which Congress can tax under the estate tax. One of the 1949 amendments to the tax should test the validity of this assumption. In an effort to bring some order out of the chaos stemming immediately from Helvering v. Hallock, and immediately from Spiegel's Estate v. Commissioner, Congress provided recently that a transfer after October 7, 1949, shall be deemed to …

Replevin Of The Contents Of Safe Deposit Boxes, Beverly Douglas Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

It is often stated that a plaintiff cannot recover in replevin' or detinue unless the defendant is in possession of the disputed goods at the commence- ment of the action. This requirement is fundamentally one of practicality. Since possession of the chattel is the primary object of an action for specific recovery, replevin is inappropriate unless the defendant is in a position to restore this possession to the plaintiff. But one may sometimes be able to put another in possession and have a duty to do so without himself having that combination of physical control and intent which the law …