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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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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
Chix Nix Bundle-O-Stix: A Feminist Critique Of The Disaggregation Of Property, Jeanne L. Schroeder
Chix Nix Bundle-O-Stix: A Feminist Critique Of The Disaggregation Of Property, Jeanne L. Schroeder
Michigan Law Review
Property was dead, to begin with. The coroner, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, revealed that the unity, tangibility, and objectivity of property perceived by our ancestors was a phantom. Property is, in fact, merely a "bundle of sticks." When conceptualized as a collection of rights, property loses its distinctive qualities and its essence. It therefore does not, or at least should not, exist. Without unity and physicality, property loses its objectivity and can only be a myth. The rabble might still believe in the old gods of property, but the educated "specialists" now know that this was vulgar superstition. Once the populace …
Icons And Aliens: Law, Aesthetics, And Environmental Change, Scott Schrader
Icons And Aliens: Law, Aesthetics, And Environmental Change, Scott Schrader
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Icons and Aliens: Law, Aesthetics, and Environmental Change by John J. Costonis
Women And The Law Of Property In Early America, David H. Bromfield
Women And The Law Of Property In Early America, David H. Bromfield
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Women and the Law of Property in Early America by Marylynn Salmon
Municipal Corporations - Liability To Abutting Property Owner For Negligence In Spraying Trees On Highway, Arthur A. Greene Jr.
Municipal Corporations - Liability To Abutting Property Owner For Negligence In Spraying Trees On Highway, Arthur A. Greene Jr.
Michigan Law Review
The defendant, a municipal corporation, used a poison spray on the trees on the highway under the authority and express duty of certain statutes that declared browntail moths and other insects a nuisance. This was done in such a manner that a part of the spray fell on the abutting land of the plaintiff, and caused the death of her poultry. The plaintiff instituted this action, relying on two counts, one alleging negligence and the other alleging an unreasonable use of the highway. Held, that the plaintiff could not recover on the first count because the abatement of this …
Contracts - Moral Obligation As Consideration - Promise To Pay For Benefits Previously Received, Michigan Law Review
Contracts - Moral Obligation As Consideration - Promise To Pay For Benefits Previously Received, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
Plaintiffs, assignees of an oil lease of land, after drilling a dry hole thereon, did not comply with the requirements of their agreement for further development within a stipulated time, in consequence of which there was a formal termination in accordance with the terms of the assignment. An extension of the lease, which the lessees obtained, was assigned to the defendants, who had knowledge of the foregoing circumstances and plaintiffs' claim of a property right in the dry hole. Defendants promised to pay plaintiffs for the use of the dry hole, but subsequently repudiated any liability on the promise. Held …
Nature And Importance Of Legal Possession, Joseph W. Bingham
Nature And Importance Of Legal Possession, Joseph W. Bingham
Michigan Law Review
To impress these unfamiliar facts on our consciousness, so that we shall not lose sight of them during the rest of our discussion, so that we shall not slur them or cloud them by vague use of symbolic ideas or terms concerning property and title, let us repeat the essence of the legal situation. Jackson is the holder of a fee simple acquired tortiously. His title to that fee--i. e. the facts which would induce the courts upon occasion to give him the remedies "vindicating" the existence of this vested fee in him--consist in his actual exclusive use and control …
Nature And Importance Of Legal Possession, Joseph W. Bingham
Nature And Importance Of Legal Possession, Joseph W. Bingham
Michigan Law Review
The careful student of our law of property needs no demonstration of the importance of legal possession. From before the date of the earliest year book the word possession and its synonym seisin have pervaded legal language and have signified matters of great consequence in the decision of cases. "In the history of our law," say Pollock and Maitland, "there is no idea more cardinal than that of seisin. Even in the law of the present day it plays a part which must be studied by every lawyer; but in the past it was so important that we may almost …