Law Commons^™

Assessing Impact Of Urban Densification On Outdoor Microclimate And Thermal Comfort Using Envi-Met Simulations For Combined Spatial-Climatic Design (Cscd) Approach, Shreya Banerjee, Rachel X.Y. Pek, Sin Kang Yik, Graces N. Ching, Xiang Tian Ho, Dzyuban Yuliya, Peter J. Crank, Juan A. Acero, Winston T. L. Chow

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Future urban planning requires context-specific integration of spatial design and microclimate especially for tropical cities with extreme weather conditions. Thus, we propose a Combined Spatial-Climatic Design approach to assess impact of urban densification on annual outdoor thermal comfort performance employing ENVI-met simulations for Singapore. We first consider building bylaws and residential site guidelines to develop eight urban-density site options for a target population range. We further classify annual weather data into seven weather-types and use them as boundary conditions for the simulations. Comparing such fifty-six combined spatial-climatic simulation outputs by analyzing Outdoor Thermal Comfort Autonomy, we report the influence of …

Sidewalk Government, Michael C. Pollack

Articles

This Article is about one of the most used, least studied spaces in the country: the sidewalk.

It is easy to think of sidewalks simply as spaces for pedestrians, and that is exactly how most scholars, policymakers, and laws treat them. But this view is fundamentally mistaken. In big cities and small towns, sidewalks are also where we gather, demonstrate, dine, exercise, rest, and shop. They are host to commerce and infrastructure. They are spaces of public access and sources of private obligation. And in all of these things, sidewalks are sites of under-appreciated conflict. The centrality of sidewalks in …

Guest Editorial: Comparative Perspectives In Multi-Owned Developments Across City-States, Seng Wei, Edward Ti

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

I am delighted to have had the opportunity to be the guest editor of this special issue titled “Comparative perspectives in multi-owned developments across City-States”. The theme of the special issue seeks to explore the worldwide phenomenon of urbanisation across all major cities, which has inevitably led to the proportion of apartment or flat dwellers increasing significantly. Issues relating to creating multi-owned schemes, resolving disputes between neighbours and management corporations and eventually the termination of the development to facilitate urban renewal are thus shared commonalities for owners, tenants, landlords and developers across jurisdictions. The aim of the special issue is …

Contract-Wrapped Property, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

For nearly two centuries, the law has allowed servitudes that “run with” real property while consistently refusing to permit servitudes attached to personal property. That is, owners of land can establish new, specific requirements for the property that bind all future owners—but owners of chattels cannot. In recent decades, however, firms have increasingly begun relying on contract provisions that purport to bind future owners of chattels. These developments began in the context of software licensing, but they have started to migrate to chattels not encumbered by software. Courts encountering these provisions have mostly missed their significance, focusing instead on questions …

Operationalising Progressive Ideas About Property: Resilient Property, Scale, And Systemic Compromise, Marc L. Roark, Lorna Fox O'Mahony

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

Property theory is at a crossroads. In recent decades, scholars seeking to advance progressive ideas about property have embraced ‘Progressive Property’ theories that seek to advance the goals of social justice and the common good, offering a vital counter-weight to utilitarian and neo-conservative accounts of property. Progressive Property theories seek to correct an imbalance in American property discourse which—across the temporal scale—has sustained a range of narratives and normative commitments, but which has veered towards extreme acquisitive individualism and the rhetoric of property absolutism since the 1970s. The idea that individual property rights are not absolute but defined by the …

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 …

Vietnam's "Entire People Ownership" Of Land: Theory And Practice, Phan Trung Hien, Hugh D. Spitzer

Articles

The Constitution of Vietnam declares that “[t]he Socialist Republic of Vietnam State is a socialist rule of law State of the People, by the People, and for the People.” It also states that land is “under ownership by the entire people represented and uniformly managed by the State.” This means the entire people of Vietnam are collective landowners and the Vietnam State is their “representative.” Given that, how might the public execute its real ownership—rather than treating “people’s ownership” as just a slogan? This article analyzes the gaps in theory and practice in Vietnam, a country with a robust market …

"Takings" And "Givings" In Singapore: Land Law And Policy In The Search For Justice, Rachel Phang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In the United States and globally, cities are increasingly plagued by deepening housing crisis and widening economic inequality. In the face of these crises, this Article focuses on the potentially powerful role for land law and policy in the search for justice. Specifically, it does so by reference to two unusual yet illuminating choices of theory and application: the case study of Singapore, and the school of thought of Georgism, both of which accord inordinate and paramount importance to land. Singapore’s land law and policy have been characterized by extensive takings and givings of land. In consequence, the State owns …

Tending Gardens, Ploughing Fields, And The Unexamined Drift To Constructive Takings At Common Law, Douglas C. Harris

All Faculty Publications

Expropriation law in Canada has operated on the basis of two presumptions at common law: that compensation is owing for the compulsory acquisition of property unless specifically indicated otherwise by statute; and, that no compensation is owing for land use regulation unless specifically provided for by statute. In its decision in Annapolis Group Inc. v Halifax Regional Municipality, the Supreme Court of Canada abandoned the second presumption that compensation for land use regulation required a statutory foundation. The majority and dissent proceed on the unexamined foundation that there is a common law basis for compensation in claims for constructive takings …

Creating Land With Artificial Oyster Rings: Legal Challenges From State Owned Bottom Land To Living Shorelines, Faith Parker, Will Reach

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

The Virginia Sea Grant program approached VCPC to conduct research in partnership with the William & Mary Public Policy Program and a James Madison University (JMU) architecture professor, Jori Erdman. Professor Erdman is researching the viability of creating land with artificial oyster rings based on similar projects seen in Louisiana. Professor Erdman has provided the diagrams of the project used throughout this paper. Ultimately, this paper examines some legal issues raised by the use of these rings to prevent coastal erosion or act as a flooding buffer for commercial or residential buildings. With this goal in mind, this paper addresses …

Twenty Years After Krieger V Law Society Of Alberta: Law Society Discipline Of Crown Prosecutors And Government Lawyers, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Krieger v. Law Society of Alberta held that provincial and territorial law societies have disciplinary jurisdiction over Crown prosecutors for conduct outside of prosecutorial discretion. The reasoning in Krieger would also apply to government lawyers. The apparent consensus is that law societies rarely exercise that jurisdiction. But in those rare instances, what conduct do Canadian law societies discipline Crown prosecutors and government lawyers for? In this article, I canvass reported disciplinary decisions to demonstrate that, while law societies sometimes discipline Crown prosecutors for violations unique to those lawyers, they often do so for violations applicable to all lawyers — particularly …

Flexibility And Conversions In New York City's Housing Stock: Building For An Era Of Rapid Change, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Noah Kazis

Law & Economics Working Papers

Post-COVID, New York City faces reduced demand for commercial space in its central business districts, even as residential demand is resurgent. Just as in past eras of New York’s history, conversion of commercial spaces into housing may help the city adapt to these new market conditions and provide an additional pathway for producing badly needed housing. If 10 percent of office and hotel spaces were converted to residential use, around 75,000 homes would be created, concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. However, there are considerable obstacles to such conversions, including a slew of regulatory barriers. Allowing greater flexibility in building uses—including by …

Real Property Issues In Family Law: An Annotated Bibliography, Allen Roston

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Shooting In The Park: Distinguishing Public From Private Property Under Georgia’S Firearms Carrying Laws, Mackenzie Miller

Law Review Blog Posts

Georgia’s recent expansion of concealed carry creates safety problems for public events within the state’s parks. Exploring Georgia’s gun laws, this Article examines possible loopholes and addresses growing concerns.

One Of The Safeguards Of The Constitution: The Direct Tax Clauses Revisted, James W. Ely Jr.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

James Madison's insistence that the apportionment rule governing the imposition of direct taxes by Congress was a constitutional safeguard highlights a puzzle that has plagued constitutional law since the early days of the Republic. The Constitution does not bar Congress from imposing direct taxes, but twice provides that direct taxes "shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers." In times of crisis, notably during the War of 1812 and the Civil War, Congress levied direct taxes on real estate and slaves. It specified the aggregate amount to be collected …

What Is The Optimal Basis For Imposing Government Liens?, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

By presenting a detailed case study, which focuses on who gets subjected to government liens, this essay helps U.S. states to make more informed decisions. It seeks to do so by critically assessing Illinois’ historic approach to lien imposition and enforcement, in part, because this state had the most forced sales of real property in recent years. In addition, Illinois also generated the largest amount of related economic losses in the U.S. during that same time period. This state did so despite adhering to the old majority rule for turning over surplus value from such sales. That rule required creditors …

Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes And Regulatory Change, Noah Kazis

Law & Economics Working Papers

This essay serves as the introduction for an edited, interdisciplinary symposium of articles studying recent land use reforms at the state and local level. These papers provide important descriptive analyses of a range of policy interventions, using quantitative and qualitative methods to provide new empirical insights into zoning reform strategies.

After situating and summarizing the collected articles, the Introduction draws out shared themes. For example, these essays demonstrate the efficacy of recent reforms, not only at facilitating housing production but at doing so in especially difficult contexts (like when producing affordable housing and redeveloping single-family neighborhoods). They point to the …

Conceptualizing Condominium Law And Children: Comparing The State Of Strata Titles Law In New South Wales And Singapore, Hang Wu Tang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Purpose: This article conceptualises the legal relations embedded within condominium housing and the various theories of property ownership to ascertain how children’s interest fit within this framework. The laws of two jurisdictions, New South Wales and Singapore are examined to determine how their strata law responds when children’s safety is at stake. Design/methodology/approach: A comparative method using case law, statutes and secondary literature across both jurisdictions is adopted. This article also draws on various theories of property ownership. Findings: Drawing on pluralist moral theories of property law, the thesis advanced is that children’s issues within condominiums should not be subject …

(Some) Land Back...Sort Of: The Transfer Of Federal Public Lands To Indian Tribes Since 1970, Audrey Glendenning, Martin Nie, Monte Mills

Articles

Federal public lands in the United States were carved from the territories of Native Nations and, in nearly every instance, required that the United States extinguish pre-existing aboriginal title. Following acquisition of these lands, the federal government pursued various strategies for them, including disposal to states and private parties, managing lands to allow for multiple uses, and conservation or protection. After over a century of such varied approaches, the modern public landscape is a complex milieu of public and private interests, laws and policies, and patchwork ownership patterns. This complexity depends on—and begins with—the history of Indigenous dispossession but subsequent …

Personhood, Property, And Public Education: The Case Of Plyler V. Doe, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Property law is having a moment, one that is getting education scholars’ attention. Progressive scholars are retooling the concepts of ownership and entitlement to incorporate norms of equality and inclusion. Some argue that property law can even secure access to public education despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s longstanding refusal to recog- nize a right to basic schooling. Others worry that property doctrine is inherently exclusionary. In their view, property-based concepts like resi- dency have produced opportunity hoarding in schools that serve affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods. Many advocates therefore believe that equity will be achieved only by moving beyond property-based claims, …

Rethinking Education Theft Through The Lens Of Intellectual Property And Human Rights, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay problematizes the increased propertization and commodification of education and calls for a rethink of the emergent concept of “education theft” through the lens of intellectual property and human rights. This concept refers to the phenomenon where parents, or legal guardians, enroll children in schools outside their school districts by intentionally violating the residency requirements. The Essay begins by revisiting the debate on intellectual property rights as property rights. It discusses the ill fit between intellectual property law and the traditional property model, the impediments the law has posed to public access to education, and select reforms that have …

Beneath The Property Taxes Financing Education, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

Many states turn in sizable part to local property taxes to finance public education. Political and academic discourse on the extent to which these taxes should serve in this role largely centers on second-order issues, such as the vices and virtues of local control, the availability of mechanisms to redistribute property tax revenues across school districts, and the overall stability of those revenues. This Essay contends that such discourse would benefit from directing greater attention to the justice of the government’s threshold choices about property law and policy that impact the property values against which property taxes are levied.

The …

Natural Law, Assumptions, And Humility, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This review of Natural Property Rights celebrates Eric Claeys’s efforts to resuscitate natural law as a viable approach to property law. Although readers unlikely to be convinced that natural law is the way to best understand property rights, Claeys succeeds in breathing new life into natural law. Natural Property Rights’ emphasis on use as property law’s fundamental value creates space to reconceptualize the rights of property owners and the place of non-owners within a just theory of property rights. The main critiques of Natural Property Rights offered in this review center around the choice to prioritize rights over duties and …

Directed Trusts And The Conflict Of Laws, Jeffrey Schoenblum

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Directed trusts are an extremely important development in trust law, indeed truly transformative, because they challenge what was presumed to be the "irreducible core" of the trust.' That is, the trustee owes certain nonwaivable fiduciary obligations to the beneficiaries with regard to the management of the trust estate and also with respect to distributions.

The directed trust in its radical format, as found to a greater or lesser degree in Tennessee, Nevada, South Dakota, and Delaware, represents a fundamental assault on this irreducible core of trust law because, with respect to investments and distributions, new actors, known as trust advisers …

Superfluous Judicial Activism: The Takings Gloss, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the summer of 2021, the Supreme Court released opinions in three Takings Clause cases. The Justices did not focus primarily on the dozen words that compose that Clause. Instead, the Court considered the expansive judicial gloss on those words, the extratextual aspects established by takings opinions over the last 100 years, since the “too far” test introduced by Justice Holmes in Pennsylvania Coal. The “Takings Gloss” is the product of holdings expanding the meaning and reach of the Takings Clause, a tangled web of opinions that have troubled lawyers, judges, and commentators for several decades. With the latest contributions, …

Law School News: Joyce And Bill Cummings Of Cummings Foundation To Deliver Keynote Address At Rwu Commencement 4-20-2023, Jill Rodrigues

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Natural Property Law: Comments On Eric Claeys's Natural Property Rights, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professor Eric Claeys is among the most thoughtful modern proponents of natural property rights. His new book, provided to conference participants in draft form, is typical of his rigorously analytical approach. It is an impressive articulation of a natural rights-based account of property. It significantly advances the debate over natural rights and should be taken seriously even by those who do not find it entirely convincing.

There are real-world political stakes in abstract-seeming questions of property theory because natural rights are often deployed to limit government regulation of property. Natural rights contrast with positivist accounts that locate the content of …

Disaster Discordance: Local Court Implementation Of State And Federal Eviction Prevention Policies During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Lauren Sudeall, Elora Lee Raymond, Philip M.E. Garboden

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Eviction sits at the nexus of property rights and the basic human need for shelter—the former benefits from a strong framework of legal protection while the latter does not. In most eviction courts across the country, therefore, the right to housing is unrecognized, while landlords’ economic interests in property are consistently vindicated.

The public health crisis unleashed by COVID-19 temporarily upended that (im)balance. Emergency federal and state eviction prevention policies issued in response to COVID-19 prioritized public health—-and the need for shelter to prevent the spread of disease—-over typically dominant property rights. In doing so, they presented courts with an …

How Far Does Natural Law Protect Private Property, James W. Ely Jr.

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article first explores the ambiguous relationship between natural law and the rights of property owners in American history. It points out that invocation of natural law principles was frequently conflated with English common law guarantees of property rights in the Revolutionary Era. Reliance on natural law as a source of protection for private property faded during the nineteenth century and was largely rejected in the early twentieth century. The Article then considers the extent to which natural law principles are useful in addressing contemporary issues relating to eminent domain and police power regulation of private property. Taking a skeptical …

Adapting Private Law For Climate Change Adaptation, Jim Rossi, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The private law of torts, property, and contracts will and should play an important role in resolving disputes regarding how private individuals and entities respond to and manage the harms of climate change that cannot be avoided through mitigation (known in climate change policy dialogue as “adaptation”). While adaptation is commonly presented as a problem needing legislative solutions, this Article presents a novel and overdue case for private law to take climate adaptation seriously.

To date, the role of private law is a significant blind spot in scholarly discussions of climate adaptation. Litigation invoking common-law doctrines in climate adaption disputes …