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Full-Text Articles in Law
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Michigan Law Review
Property law’s roots are rural. America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded their physical place in it. But we have drifted far from this ideal. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, and rural communities are in decline. The fee simple ownership form has failed every agrarian objective but one: the maintenance of white landownership. For it was also embedded in the original American experiment that land ownership would be racialized for the benefit of its white citizens, through acts of …
Property, Unbundled Water Entitlements, And Anticommons Tragedies: A Cautionary Tale From Australia, Paul Babie, Paul Leadbeter, Kyriaco Nikias
Property, Unbundled Water Entitlements, And Anticommons Tragedies: A Cautionary Tale From Australia, Paul Babie, Paul Leadbeter, Kyriaco Nikias
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
As water becomes an increasingly scarce resource, a lack of clarity in relation to its use can produce both conflict among and inefficient use by users. In order to encourage markets in water and to ensure the viability and functionality of those markets, governments in many jurisdictions have moved away from commons property as a means of water allocation, and towards systems of private property in water. In doing so, one policy and legal option is “unbundling”, which seeks carefully to define both the entitlement to water and its separation into constituent parts. Advocates claim that unbundling makes water rights …
Property Rights In Augmented Reality, Declan T. Conroy
Property Rights In Augmented Reality, Declan T. Conroy
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Increasingly, cities, towns, and even rural communities are being slowly reshaped by a dynamic yet initially imperceptible phenomenon: the elaboration of augmented reality. Through applications that place virtual features over specific, real-world locations, layers of augmented reality are proliferating, adding new elements to an increasingly wide range of places. However, while many welcome the sudden appearance of arenas for battling digital creatures in their neighborhood or the chance to write virtual messages on their neighbor’s wall, the areas being augmented oftentimes are privately owned, thereby implicating property rights. Many intrusions, of course, are de minimis: an isolated, invisible Pikachu unexpectedly …
Optimal Property Rights For Emerging Natural Resources: A Case Study On Owning Atmospheric Moisture, Jianlin Chen
Optimal Property Rights For Emerging Natural Resources: A Case Study On Owning Atmospheric Moisture, Jianlin Chen
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Article critically examines the design of property rights for emerging natural resources—naturally occurring substances that humans have only recently come to be able to exploit viably—through a case study of how the fifty states allocate ownership in, and regulate the use of, atmospheric moisture, an issue that has emerged in the context of weather modification (particularly cloud seeding). Building on the surprising finding that legislative declarations of state ownership have not resulted in greater regulatory control or other substantial restrictions on private use, this Article highlights a dimension of property rights design that has yet to receive concerted scholarly …
An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk
An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk
Articles
Takings scholarship has long focused on the niceties of Supreme Court doctrine, while ignoring the operation of takings law "on the ground" in the state and lower federal courts, which together decide the vast bulk of all takings cases. This study, based primarily on an empirical analysis of more than 2000 reported decisions ovcr the period 1979 through 2012, attempts to fill that void. This study establishes that the Supreme Court's categorical rules govern almost no state takings cases, and that takings claims based on government regulation almost invariably fail. By contrast, when takings claims arise out of government action …
Of Property Rights And Rights To Property, James E. Krier
Of Property Rights And Rights To Property, James E. Krier
Articles
In 2004, President George W. Bush said, “I believe in private property so much, I want everyone in America to have some.” Much earlier, in 1948, an economics professor from the University of Texas expressed the same sentiment in strikingly similar terms. When asked by an investigatory committee of the Texas legislature whether he favored private property, he replied, “I do . . . and so strongly that I want everyone in Texas to have some.” Even putting aside the possibility that the President’s speechwriters found inspiration in an unacknowledged source, there are several interesting things to note about these …
Finding, Sharing And Risk Of Loss: Of Whales, Bees And Other Valuable Finds In Iceland, Denmark And Norway, William I. Miller, Helle Vogt
Finding, Sharing And Risk Of Loss: Of Whales, Bees And Other Valuable Finds In Iceland, Denmark And Norway, William I. Miller, Helle Vogt
Articles
The focus of the paper is twofold: the first part is about how property rights were assigned and ranked in finds, both in those items such as bees, rings and other valuables which were previously owned, and also in those things, like whales, which were unowned. We focus on Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian laws from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, yet most of the provisions were copied into later laws and were in force up until modern times, some even current now. The second part treats the question of how risks of loss were handled, and how simple forms of …
A Framework For Understanding Property Regulation And Land Use Control From A Dynamic Perspective, Donald J. Kochan
A Framework For Understanding Property Regulation And Land Use Control From A Dynamic Perspective, Donald J. Kochan
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
Our land use control system operates across a variety of multidimensional and dynamic categories. Learning to navigate within and between these categories requires an appreciation for their interconnected, dynamic, and textured components and an awareness of alternative mechanisms for achieving one’s land use control preferences and one’s desired ends. Whether seeking to minimize controls as a property owner or attempting to place controls on the land uses of another, one should take time to understand the full ecology of the system. This Article looks at four broad categories of control: (1) no controls, or the state of nature; (2) judicial …
The Possession Heuristic, James E. Krier, Christopher Serkin
The Possession Heuristic, James E. Krier, Christopher Serkin
Book Chapters
A heuristic, as Daniel Kahneman (2011: 98) observes, “is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions.” Kahneman is a psychologist, one of a handful of scholars who have brought heuristics to the attention of a general audience, thanks in large part to several books (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982; Gilovich, Driffin, and Kahneman 2002). Just as Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 ideas about paradigms in the history of science are fodder for academics in all sorts of fields (this for better or worse), so too for Kahneman and company’s ideas about heuristics, and legal academics …
Passive Takings: The State's Affirmative Duty To Protect Property, Christopher Serkin
Passive Takings: The State's Affirmative Duty To Protect Property, Christopher Serkin
Michigan Law Review
The purpose of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause is to protect property owners from the most significant costs of legal transitions. Paradigmatically, a regulatory taking involves a government action that interferes with expectations about the content of property rights. Legal change has therefore always been central to regulatory takings claims. This Article argues that it does not need to be and that governments can violate the Takings Clause by failing to act in the face of a changing world. This argument represents much more than a minor refinement of takings law because recognizing governmental liability for failing to act means …
Judicial Takings: Musings On Stop The Beach, James E. Krier
Judicial Takings: Musings On Stop The Beach, James E. Krier
Articles
Judicial takings weren’t much talked about until a few years ago, when the Stop the Beach case made them suddenly salient. The case arose from a Florida statute, enacted in 1961, that authorizes public restoration of eroded beaches by adding sand to widen them seaward. Under the statute, the state has title to any new dry land resulting from restored beaches, meaning that waterfront owners whose land had previously extended to the mean high-tide line end up with public beaches between their land and the water. This, the owners claimed, resulted in a taking of their property, more particularly their …
Property's Morale, Nestor M. Davidson
Property's Morale, Nestor M. Davidson
Michigan Law Review
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 …
The Accession Insight And Patent Infringement Remedies, Peter Lee
The Accession Insight And Patent Infringement Remedies, Peter Lee
Michigan Law Review
What is the appropriate allocation of rights and obligations when one party, without authorization, substantially improves the property of another? According to the doctrine of accession, a good faith improver may take title to such improved property, subject to compensating the original owner for the value of the source materials. While shifting title to a converter seems like a remarkable remedy, this outcome merely underscores the equitable nature of accession, which aims for fair allocation of property rights and compensation between two parties who both have plausible claims to an improved asset. This Article draws upon accession-a physical property doctrine …
An Analysis Of Article 28 Of The United Nations Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, And Proposals For Reform, David Fautsch
An Analysis Of Article 28 Of The United Nations Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, And Proposals For Reform, David Fautsch
Michigan Journal of International Law
The purpose of this Note is two-fold: first, to demonstrate why the standards set out in Article 28 require further clarification, and second, to propose reforms (both inside and outside of the United Nations framework) that might benefit indigenous peoples claiming land rights.
Property Rights & The Demands Of Transformation, Bernadette Atuahene
Property Rights & The Demands Of Transformation, Bernadette Atuahene
Michigan Journal of International Law
Countries like those in Southern Africa will never emerge from the indomitable shadow of inequity and the serious threat of backlash unless real property is redistributed; but, the conception of property these countries explicitly or implicitly adopt can adversely affect their ability to redistribute. Under the classical conception of real property (the classical conception), redistribution is difficult because title deed holders are a privileged group who are given nearly absolute property protection. Strangely, the classical conception is ascendant in many transitional states where redistribution is essential. The specific question this Article addresses is: for states where past property dispossession has …
Property And Relative Status, Nestor M. Davidson
Property And Relative Status, Nestor M. Davidson
Michigan Law Review
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-signalingf unction of property-withp roperty 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 …
Evolutionary Theory And The Origin Of Property Rights, James E. Krier
Evolutionary Theory And The Origin Of Property Rights, James E. Krier
Articles
For legal scholars, the evolution of property rights has been a topic in search of a theory. My aim here is to draw together various accounts (some of them largely neglected in the legal literature), from dated to modern, and suggest a way they can be melded into a plausible explanation of property's genesis and early development. What results hardly amounts to a theory, but it does suggest an outline for one. Moreover, it provides a primer on the subject, a reasonably solid foundation for thinking and talking about the evolution of property rights.
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Michigan Law Review
Clarity can be a considerable virtue in property rights. But even when property rights are defined clearly in the abstract, ascertaining the scope of those rights in concrete situations often entails significant cost. In some instances, the cost of acquiring information about the scope of property rights will exceed the social value of that information. In those circumstances, further search for information about the scope of rights is inefficient; the social harm avoided by further search does not justify the costs of the search. Potential resource users, however make decisions based on private costs and benefits, not social costs and …
The Public Trust In Surface Waterways And Submerged Lands Of The Great Lakes States, Bertram C. Frey, Andrew Mutz
The Public Trust In Surface Waterways And Submerged Lands Of The Great Lakes States, Bertram C. Frey, Andrew Mutz
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The modern public trust doctrine compels each Great Lakes state to protect the sustainable future of the Lakes and to preserve traditional public uses. At the same time, the doctrine constrains the states' powers to allow exploitation of trust resources. This Article provides a brief historical overview of the public trust doctrine in waterways and their submerged lands. It next explores how the eight Great Lakes states have applied the doctrine, discusses the surprising number of differences in the doctrine's development from state to state, and provides comparison charts. After analyzing the variety of approaches used by the eight states …
Compensation For Porperty Under The European Convention On Human Rights, Tom Allen
Compensation For Porperty Under The European Convention On Human Rights, Tom Allen
Michigan Journal of International Law
This Article asks whether the right to property, as a human right, serves the same general purpose as other human rights. The Article does so by examining the standards relating to compensation for deprivations of property under the European human rights system. If the system protects property for similar reasons as other fundamental rights, the interpretation of the right to property should draw upon the principles developed in relation to the interpretation of other rights. However, if the right to property is distinct from other human rights, then perhaps guidance on its interpretation should come from comparative law, specifically in …
Review Of Optional Law: The Structure Of Legal Entitlements, Omri Ben-Shahar
Review Of Optional Law: The Structure Of Legal Entitlements, Omri Ben-Shahar
Reviews
The concept of "property rights" plays a prominent role in economic theory. Economists have been studying how property rights emerged as a system of allocation, replacing regimes of open access and lack of legal order. Property rights are regularly viewed by economists as the primary policy tool to control the incentives to invest in new assets (e.g., in information) and to maintain existing assets (e.g., fisheries) when contracts are incomplete. Property rights are the endowments that individuals exchange in a market economy, the equity that investors trade in financial markets. Property rights are a basic building block in economics.
Accumulation, Anthony Paul Farley
Accumulation, Anthony Paul Farley
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Anthony Farley brings a focus on class back to Critical Race Theory by exploring the intersection of race and class as a singular concept that finds its creation in the marking of difference through the primal scene of accumulation. Professor Farley's Essay contends that the rule of law is the endless unfolding of that primal scene of accumulation. By choosing to pray for legal relief rather than dismantling the system, the slave chooses enslavement over freedom. Professor Farley discusses the concept of ownership as violence and explains that property rights are the means of protecting the master class until everything …
Individual Aboriginal Rights, John W. Ragsdale Jr.
Individual Aboriginal Rights, John W. Ragsdale Jr.
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article will, in Section I, deal with the legal development of the concept of individual aboriginal rights. It will focus on the Western Shoshone land claims before the Indian Claims Commission, and the federal government's trespass claims against the ranching operations of the redoubtable, irrepressible Dann sisters. Section II will explore the development and utilization of the doctrine of individual aboriginal rights in a series of cases involving the Dann sisters, subsequent Western Shoshone, and other efforts by native people to secure subsistence hunting and fishing rights and possession of or access to sacred sites. Section III will explore …
Three Faces Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller
Three Faces Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller
Articles
Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …
The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller
The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller
Articles
If your house and fields are worth more separately, divide them; if you want to leave a ring to your child now and grandchild later, split the ownership in a trust. The American law of property encourages owners to subdivide resources freely. Hidden within the law, however, is a boundary principle that limits the right to subdivide private property into wasteful fragments. While people often create wealth when they break up and recombine property in novel ways, owners may make mistakes, or their self-interest may clash with social welfare. Property law responds with diverse doctrines that prevent and abolish excessive …
Chicana/Chicano Land Tenure In The Agrarian Domain: On The Edge Of A "Naked Knife", Guadalupe T. Lunda
Chicana/Chicano Land Tenure In The Agrarian Domain: On The Edge Of A "Naked Knife", Guadalupe T. Lunda
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Neither sovereignty nor property rights could forestall American geopolitical expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century. The conflicts that resulted from this clash of doctrine with desire are perhaps most evident in the history of the Chicanas/Chicanos of Texas, California, and the Southwest, who sought to maintain their land and property, as guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in the aftermath of the U.S.- Mexico War. Integrating an exploration of case law with political and social histories of the period, the Author explores the sociolegal significance of Chicana/Chicano land dispossession; exposes the racial, economic, and political motivations …
The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: Property In The Transition From Marx To Markets, Michael A. Heller
The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: Property In The Transition From Marx To Markets, Michael A. Heller
Articles
Why are many storefronts in Moscow empty, while street kiosks in front are full of goods? In this Article, Professor Heller develops a theory of anticommons property to help explain the puzzle of empty storefronts and full kiosks. Anticommons property can be understood as the mirror image of commons property. By definition, in a commons, multiple owners are each endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, and no one has the right to exclude another When too many owners hold such privileges of use, the resource is prone to overuse - a tragedy of the commons. Depleted fisheries …
Faculty Spotlight, Michael Heller
Faculty Spotlight, Michael Heller
Other Publications
Professor Michael Heller talks about his teaching and research.
Pragmatism, Feminism, And The Problem Of Bad Coherence, Catharine Pierce Wells
Pragmatism, Feminism, And The Problem Of Bad Coherence, Catharine Pierce Wells
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Reinterpreting Property by Margaret Jane Radin
Reforming The State-Enterprise Property Relationship In The People's Republic Of China: The Corporatization Of State-Owned Enterprises, Deborah Kay Johns
Reforming The State-Enterprise Property Relationship In The People's Republic Of China: The Corporatization Of State-Owned Enterprises, Deborah Kay Johns
Michigan Journal of International Law
Part I of this Note first describes the problems that have prodded China to restructure its SOEs and then explains the root of those problems - the state-enterprise property relationship. This part concludes with a description of the unsuccessful attempts to date to reform that relationship. To understand why these efforts have met with little success, Part II explores the way in which most transition economies have attempted to address the ambiguity in the state-enterprise property relationship, by abolishing it through privatization. Although privatization is neither economically nor ideologically suited to China, experience with privatization does hold one lesson for …