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Full-Text Articles in Law
Cultural Property: “Progressive Property In Action”, J. Peter Byrne
Cultural Property: “Progressive Property In Action”, J. Peter Byrne
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Cultural property law fulfills many of the normative and jurisprudential goals of progressive property theory. Cultural property limits the normal prerogatives of owners in order to give legal substance to the interests of the public or of specially protected non-owners. It recognizes that preservation of and access to heritage resources advance public values such as cultural enrichment and community identity. The proliferation of cultural property laws and their acceptance by courts has occurred despite a resurgent property fundamentalism embraced by the Supreme Court. Thus, this Article seeks to explicate the category of cultural property, its fulfillment of progressive theory, and …
Seeing Like A Chocolate City: Reimagining Detroit’S Future Through Its Past, Sheila R. Foster
Seeing Like A Chocolate City: Reimagining Detroit’S Future Through Its Past, Sheila R. Foster
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay is part of an online symposium on Michelle Wilde Anderson's “The Fight to Save the Town.” In it, Anderson captures how the rise and fall of Detroit maps onto so many other important cultural, political, social, and economic moments of the twentieth century. As Anderson rightly notes, many of the ways in which the city’s history is commonly told represent a “white gaze on Detroit.” What this narrative often leaves out is the critical role of the Black middle and professional class in stabilizing or holding up the city during the period often associated with the city’s decline. …
Infrastructure Sharing In Cities, Sheila Foster
Infrastructure Sharing In Cities, Sheila Foster
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this Essay, I reflect on the different ways in which cities engaged in what I call “infrastructure sharing” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cities around the world responded to the pandemic by repurposing their streets and sidewalks into outdoor seating, dining spaces, and car-free pedestrian corridors. At the same time, many cities and states also faced calls to “reclaim” underutilized public and private structures like empty houses and hotels and put them to a use responsive to the crisis. The Essay will highlight the difference between sharing property and assets that are part of the “public estate” and dedicated exclusively …
The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park
The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely …
Penn Central In Retrospect: The Past And Future Of Historic Preservation Regulation, J. Peter Byrne
Penn Central In Retrospect: The Past And Future Of Historic Preservation Regulation, J. Peter Byrne
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York is one of the best known cases in the Property Law canon. The Court there held that the refusal of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to permit the owner to erect a 50-storey tower on top of Grand Central Terminal did not effect a taking of private property requiring the payment of compensation. The decision now is more than forty years old. Taught since then in most first-year Property classes, Penn Central endures as the foundation of the modern application of the …
Race And Property Law, K-Sue Park
Race And Property Law, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This chapter offers an outline for understanding the key role of race in producing property values in the history of the American property law system. It identifies major developments in the mutually formative relationship between race and property in America that made and remade property interests in America through the processes of 1) dispossessing nonwhites, 2) degrading their homelands, communities, and selves, and 3) limiting their efforts to enter public space and occupy or acquire property within the regime thereby established. First, it describes the use of law to create the two most important forms of property in the colonies …
Conquest And Slavery In The Property Law Course: Notes For Teachers, K-Sue Park
Conquest And Slavery In The Property Law Course: Notes For Teachers, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This piece contains ideas for teaching about the foundational place of the histories of conquest and slavery to American property law and the property law course. I begin by briefly reviewing how these topics have been erased and marginalized from the study of American property law, as mentioned by casebooks in the field published from the late nineteenth century to the present. I then show how the history of conquest constituted the context in which the singular American land system and traditional theories of acquisition developed, before turning to the history of the American slave trade and the long history …
The Public Trust In Public Art: Property Law's Case Against Private Hoarding Of “Public” Art, Hope M. Babcock
The Public Trust In Public Art: Property Law's Case Against Private Hoarding Of “Public” Art, Hope M. Babcock
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Private hoarding of important works of art is a phenomenon that has caused their disappearance from public view. The loss of this art undermines republican values like education, community, and citizenship, and therefore should be resisted. This Article explores various legal tools to prevent this from happening, including doctrines and laws that protect artists’ rights in their work, but which offer the public little relief. Turning to two well-known common-law doctrines—public dedication and public trust—to see whether they might provide a solution, the author favors the latter because it is nimbler and better suited to the public nature of important …
Law As Asymmetric Information: Theory, Application, And Results In The Context Of Foreign Direct Investment In Real Estate, Patrick J. Glen
Law As Asymmetric Information: Theory, Application, And Results In The Context Of Foreign Direct Investment In Real Estate, Patrick J. Glen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In his seminal 1970 article on lemon markets, George Akerlof posited the possibility of market failure in the presence of asymmetric information regarding a good’s value. In the intervening four decades, the importance of accurate valuation information has grown as transnational trade has boomed. The aim of the instant article is to assess the potential impact on transnational trade of asymmetric information regarding the legal attributes of a given good. Inaccurate or asymmetric information regarding relevant legal attributes may give rise to the same problem of market failure that Akerlof initially posited. If buyers are unsure of the ownership of …
Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst
Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. 1805), one of the most commonly assigned cases in the first-year Property course, was a dispute over the ownership of a fox discovered at large “upon a certain wild and uninhabited, unpossessed and waste land, called the beach.” For a very long time, all that was known about the case, other than the report itself, was a vivid but antiquarian account published in the Sag Harbor Express of October 24, 1895, by the judge and local historian Henry Parsons Hedges (1817-1911). Hedges claimed to have met Jesse Pierson (1780-1840) and Lodowick Post …