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Full-Text Articles in Law
Private Rights In Public Lands: The Chicago Lakefront, Montgomery Ward, And The Public Dedication Doctrine, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill
Private Rights In Public Lands: The Chicago Lakefront, Montgomery Ward, And The Public Dedication Doctrine, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill
Faculty Scholarship
When one thinks of how the law protects public rights in open spaces, the public trust doctrine comes to mind. This is especially true in Chicago. The modem public trust doctrine was born in the landmark decision in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, growing out of struggles over the use of land along the margin of Lake Michigan in that city. Yet Chicago's premier park – Grant Park, sitting on that land in the center of downtown Chicago – owes its existence to a different legal doctrine. This other doctrine, developed by American courts in the nineteenth century, …
Rent Seeking And The Compensation Principle, Thomas W. Merrill
Rent Seeking And The Compensation Principle, Thomas W. Merrill
Faculty Scholarship
The reaction to Richard Epstein's Takings has been almost universally negative. Joseph Sax finds Epstein the "prisoner of an intellectual style so confining and of a philosophy so rigid that he has disabled himself from seeing problems as beyond the grasp of mere formalism." Thomas Grey concludes that "Takings belongs with the output of the constitutional lunatic fringe" and is "a travesty of constitutional scholarship." Thomas Ross, writing in this Law Review, says that, at least from an academic perspective, Takings is "a patent and howling failure." Epstein has provoked even the student editors of the Harvard Law Review …