Law Commons^™

Rationing Access, Roy Baharad, Gideon Parchomovsky

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Protection of common natural resources is one of the foremost challenges facing our society. Since Garrett Hardin published his immensely influential The Tragedy of the Commons, theorists have contemplated the best way to save common-pool resources—national parks, fisheries, heritage sites, and fragile ecosystems—from overuse and extinction. These efforts have given rise to three principal methods: private ownership, community governance, and use restrictions. In this Essay, we present a different solution to the commons problem that has eluded the attention of theorists: access rationing. Access rationing measures rely not only on restrictions on the number of users but also on …

Leases As Forms, David A. Hoffman, Anton Strezhnev

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We offer the first large scale descriptive study of residential leases, based on a dataset of ~170,000 residential leases filed in support of over ~200,000 Philadelphia eviction proceedings from 2005 through 2019. These leases are highly likely to contain unenforceable terms, and their pro-landlord tilt has increased sharply over time. Matching leases with individual tenant characteristics, we show that unlawful terms are surprisingly likely to be associated with more expensive leaseholds in richer, whiter parts of the city. This result is linked to landlords' growing adoption of shared forms, originally created by non-profit landlord associations, and more recently available online …

Self-Actualization And The Need To Create As A Limit On Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

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Personhood theory is almost invariably cited as one of the primary theoretical bases for copyright. The conventional wisdom views creative works as the embodiment of their creator’s personality. This unique connection between authors and their works justifies giving authors property interests in the results of their creative efforts.

This Chapter argues that the conventional wisdom is too limited. It offers too narrow a vision of the ways that creativity can develop personality by focusing exclusively on the results of the creative process and ignoring the self-actualizing benefits of the creative process itself. German aesthetic theory broadens the understanding of the …

The Costs Of Critical Habitat Or Owl’S Well That Ends Well, Jonathan Klick, J.B. Ruhl

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When the Fish and Wildlife Service designated land in four counties of Arizona as “critical habitat” necessary for the protection of the endangered cactus ferruginous pygmy‐owl, property values dropped considerably. When the owl was later delisted, property values jumped back up. We use difference-in-difference and synthetic control designs to identify this effect with Zillow property value data. The results provide an estimate of the costs of this critical habitat designation, and they are considerable, contrary to the regulators’ position that critical habitat protection imposes no incremental costs beyond the original endangered species listing.

Predatory Cities, Bernadette Atuahene

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Between 2011 and 2015, the Wayne County Treasurer completed the property tax foreclosure process for one in four properties in Detroit, Michigan. No other American city has experienced this elevated rate of property tax foreclosures since the Great Depression. Studies reveal that the City of Detroit systematically and illegally inflated the assessed value of most of its residential properties, which led to inflated property tax bills unaffordable to many homeowners. Extraordinary tax foreclosure rates and extensive dispossession resulted. Consequently, Detroit has become a “predatory city”—a new and important sociolegal concept that this Article develops. Predatory cities are urban areas where …

Personal Property Security Law: International Ambitions And Local Realities, Giuliano G. Castellano, Andrea Tosato

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Personal property security law is a key element of “access to credit” and “financial inclusion”. The prevailing view is that a legal framework enabling the effective use of personal property as collateral markedly benefits both lenders and borrowers. Lenders can offer financing at a lower cost thanks to reduced credit risk; borrowers can access funding by leveraging the otherwise unavailable value of the assets integral to their operations.

Over the past century, the priorities of personal property security law have evolved fundamentally. As small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and individual entrepreneurs have become the growth engine of both developed and …

The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman

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The Article is adapted from a keynote lecture about my book, THE RIGHT OF PUBLICITY: PRIVACY REIMAGINED FOR A PUBLIC WORLD (Harvard Univ. Press 2018), delivered at Columbia Law School for its symposium, “Owning Personality: The Expanding Right of Publicity.” The book challenges the conventional historical and theoretical understanding of the right of publicity. By uncovering the history of the right of publicity’s development, the book reveals solutions to current clashes with free speech, individual liberty, and copyright law, as well as some opportunities for better protecting privacy in the digital age.

The lecture (as adapted for this Article) explores …

Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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A legal system that relies on private property rights to promote economic development must consider that profits can come from two different sources. First, both competition under constant technology and innovation promote economic growth by granting many of the returns to the successful developer. Competition and innovation both increase output, whether measured by quantity or quality. Second, however, profits can come from practices that reduce output, in some cases by reducing quantity, or in others by reducing innovation.

IP rights and competition policy were traditionally regarded as in conflict. IP rights create monopoly, which was thought to be inimical to …

The State Giveth And Taketh Away: Race, Class, And Urban Hospital Closings, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

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This essay uses concepts from Bernadette Atuahene’s book We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program to examine the trend of urban hospital closings. It does so by focusing specifically on the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital, a charitable hospital in South Los Angeles, California that emerged after the Watts riots in 1965. The essay illustrates how Professor Atuahene’s framework can generate unique questions about the closing of urban hospitals, and public bureaucracies more generally. The essay also demonstrates how Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital’s trajectory hones some of Atuahene’s concepts in ways …

Stategraft, Bernadette Atuahene, Timothy Hodge

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Although sometimes difficult to detect, governmental power abuses can have detrimental impacts. Property tax assessments provide an effective lens to examine this phenomenon because, given the complexity of calculating property tax assessments, it is difficult for citizens to know when local government has exceeded its legitimate taxing authority and crossed into the realm of illegal extraction. Michigan is an ideal case study because it protects property owners by making assessment-related power abuses more visible through a unique state constitutional provision: property tax assessments cannot exceed 50 percent of a property’s market value. Abuses have persisted nevertheless. Between 2011 and 2015, …

Exclusionary Megacities, Wendell Pritchett, Shitong Qiao

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Human beings should live in places where they are most productive, and megacities, where information, innovation and opportunities congregate, would be the optimal choice. Yet megacities in both China and the U.S. are excluding people by limiting housing supply. Why, despite their many differences, is the same type of exclusion happening in both Chinese and U.S. megacities? Urban law and policy scholars argue that Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) homeowners are taking over megacities in the U.S. and hindering housing development therein. They pin their hopes on an efficient growth machine that makes sure “above all, nothing gets in the way of building.” …

Insolvency Law As Credit Enhancement And Enforcement Mechanism: A Closer Look At Global Modernization Of Secured Transactions Law, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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This essay revisits earlier work on the relationship between insolvency law and secured credit, the role of secured transactions law reforms, and the benefits of secured credit. These complex relationships require a holistic approach toward reforms of secured transactions law and insolvency law. Merely enacting sensible secured transactions laws and insolvency laws may be insufficient to produce the intended benefits from either set of laws.

The essay is informed by an ongoing qualitative empirical study of business credit in Japan—the Japanese Business Credit Project. The JBCP involves interviews of representatives of Japanese financial institutions and governmental bodies and legal practitioners …

The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman

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This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal’s 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press. Insights from the book suggest that New York should not upend more than one hundred years of established privacy law in the state, nor jeopardize its citizens’ ownership over their own names, likenesses, and voices by replacing these privacy laws with a new and independent …

When Law Is Complicit In Gender Bias: Ending De Jure Discrimination Against Women As An Important Target Of Sustainable Development Goal 5, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

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Ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right, but also crucial to accelerating sustainable development. The very first target of Goal 5. 1.1 calls to end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere and the indicator for the goal is: “Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex”. In many countries around the world the legal frameworks themselves allow for both direct (de jure) and indirect (de facto) discrimination against women. This essay identifies some areas …

Distributive Justice And Donative Intent, Alexander Boni-Saenz

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The inheritance system is beset by formalism. Probate courts reject wills on technicalities and refuse to correct obvious drafting mistakes by testators. These doctrines lead to donative errors, or outcomes that are not in line with the decedent’s donative intent. While scholars and reformers have critiqued the intent-defeating effects of formalism in the past, none have examined the resulting distribution of donative errors and connected it to broader social and economic inequalities. Drawing on egalitarian theories of distributive justice, this Article develops a novel critique of formalism in the inheritance law context. The central normative claim is that formalistic wills …

Brexit And Ip: The Great Unraveling?, Graeme Dinwoodie, Rochelle Dreyfuss

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In theory, exit from Brexit will free the United Kingdom from the constraints and burdens of EU membership. It will transfer sovereignty back to the people from the technocratic rule of Brussels; replace the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice with the adjudicative power of national courts; and allow the UK to tailor its market regulation in the particular exigencies of the UK economy. Whether, as a general matter, the restoration of a classic Westphalian state enhances value either nationally or globally is an issue we leave to others to debate.We ask a different question: we explore how well the …

Partial Takings, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

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Partial takings allow the government to expropriate the parts of an asset it needs, leaving the owner the remainder. Both vital and common, partial takings present unique challenges to the standard rules of eminent domain. Partial takings may result in the creation of suboptimal, and even unusable, parcels. Additionally, partial takings create assessment problems that do not arise when parcels are taken as a whole. Finally, partial takings engender opportunities for inefficient strategic behavior on the part of the government after the partial taking has been carried out. Current jurisprudence fails to resolve these problems and can even exacerbate them. …

Immovable-Associated Equipment Under The Draft Mac Protocol: A Sui Generis Challenge For The Cape Town Convention, Benjamin Von Bodungen, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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UNIDROIT is in the process of adopting a fourth Protocol under the umbrella of the Cape Town Convention, the MAC Protocol, which will cover mining, agricultural and construction equipment. This article addresses a challenge faced by the MAC Protocol that was not encountered in the development of the previous Protocols - the potential for MAC equipment to be associated with immovable property in ways that result in the holder of an interest in the immovable property acquiring an interest in the associated MAC equipment under the law of the State in which the immovable property is located. The article first …

Seizing Family Homes From The Innocent: Can The Eighth Amendment Protect Minorities And The Poor From Excessive Punishment In Civil Forfeiture?, Louis S. Rulli

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Civil forfeiture laws permit the government to seize and forfeit private property that has allegedly facilitated a crime without ever charging the owner with any criminal offense. The government extracts payment in kind—property—and gives nothing to the owner in return, based upon a legal fiction that the property has done wrong. As such, the government’s taking of property through civil forfeiture is punitive in nature and constrained by the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause, which is intended to curb abusive punishments.

The Supreme Court’s failure to announce a definitive test for determining the constitutional excessiveness of civil forfeiture takings under …

Is The Government Fiscally Blind? An Empirical Examination Of The Effect Of The Compensation Requirement On Eminent-Domain Exercises, Ronit Levine-Schnur, Gideon Parchomovsky

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We empirically test the fiscal-illusion hypothesis in the takings context in Israel. Israeli law allows local governments to expropriate up to 40 percent of any parcel without compensation. In 2001, the Israeli Supreme Court created a carve out for takings of 100 percent, requiring full compensation in such cases. We analyze data for 3,140 takings cases in Tel Aviv between 1990 and 2014. There was no disproportionate share of takings of just under 40 percent. Nor was there a long-term drop in the share of 100 percent takings after 2001. Although a short-term drop in the share of 100 percent …

Eviction Court And A Judicial Duty Of Inquiry, Harold Krent, Peter Cheung, Kayla Higgins, Matthew Mcelwee

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No abstract provided.

A Solution In Search Of A Problem: Kelo Reform Over Ten Years, Wendell Pritchett

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Kelo is NOT Dred Scott. Kelo is not only NOT Dred Scott, it was, as this Essay will argue, the right decision given the facts of the cases and the current state of legal jurisprudence. As an academic who has detailed the historic exploitation of eminent domain to uproot persons of color in this country, I find it interesting, and somewhat troubling, that the case has received so much criticism, much more criticism, I would argue, than other Supreme Court decisions that deserve condemnation. Certainly, eminent domain, like any other government power, must be regulated carefully. But upending …

Copyright And Good Faith Purchasers, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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Good faith purchasers for value — individuals who unknowingly and in good faith purchase property from a seller whose own actions in obtaining the property are of questionable legality — have long obtained special protection under the common law. Despite the seller’s own actions being tainted, such purchasers obtain valid title themselves and are allowed to freely alienate the property without any restriction. Modern copyright law, however, does just the opposite. Individuals who unknowingly and in good faith purchase property embodying an unauthorized copy of a protected work are altogether precluded from subsequently alienating such property, or risk running afoul …

Of Property And Information, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

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The property-information interface is perhaps the most crucial and under-theorized dimension of property law. Information about property can make or break property rights. Information about assets and property rights can dramatically enhance the value of ownership. Conversely, dearth of information can significantly reduce the benefit associated with ownership. It is surprising, therefore, that contemporary property theorists do not engage in sustained analysis of the property-information interface and in particular of registries — the repositories of information about property.

Once, things were different. In the past, discussions of registries used to be a core topic in property classes and a focal …

The Dual-Grant Theory Of Fair Use, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

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Fair use is one of modern law's most fascinating and troubling doctrines. It is amorphous and vague, and notoriously difficult to apply. It is, at the same time, vitally important in copyright and perhaps the most frequently raised and litigated issue in the law of intellectual property.

This article offers a novel theory of fair use that provides both a better understanding of the underlying principles and better tools for applying the doctrine.

In contrast with the dominant understanding of fair use in the literature — that fair use addresses market failure — the article proposes viewing fair use as …

The Other Side Of Garcia:The Right Of Publicity And Copyright Preemption, Jennifer E. Rothman

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This essay is adapted from a talk that I gave on October 2, 2015 at Columbia Law School’s annual Kernochan Center Symposium. The all-day conference focused on Copyright Outside the Box. The essay considers the aftermath of Garcia v. Google, Inc., and the Ninth Circuit’s suggestion in that case that Garcia might have a right of publicity claim against the filmmakers, even though her copyright claim failed.

The essay provides a partial update of my prior work, Copyright Preemption and the Right of Publicity, 36 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 199 (2002), and suggests that despite numerous cases over …

Rights At Risk In Privatized Public Housing, Jaime Alison Lee

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Traditional public housing is dwindling. Federal policy has increasingly encouraged privatization, shifting stewardship of public housing out of the hands of government and into the hands of private, for-profit companies. Privatization in this context has both benefits and risks. A particularly compelling area of study is the attempt by lawmakers to conscript private contractors into serving public policy goals. Private landlords are obligated not merely to provide housing, but to conduct themselves in ways that promote the interests of vulnerable people. The case of public housing suggests that legislative mandates and contractual obligations are not enough to assure this outcome, …

Fractured Markets And Legal Institutions, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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This article considers how we can improve legal outcomes of conflicts that occur in very small arenas. The conflicts can be of many kinds, including a nuisance dispute between neighbors, an impending collision between two moving vehicles, a joint decision between spouses about whether or on what terms to continue their marriage, or a disagreement between managers and shareholders within a firm.

The prevailing literature typically refers to these small environments as “markets.” Thinking of them as markets, however, averts our attention from larger environments that should be considered but that often do not function well as private markets. For …

Tools Of Ignorance: An Appraisal Of Deficiency Judgments, Alan M. Weinberger

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While achieving success as a major league catcher, Mike Matheny was preparing for a post-baseball career in real estate development. He could not have picked a worse time to pursue his aspiration. Matheny lost his accumulated savings and his family’s home after being held personally liable for a $4.2 million deficiency judgment following foreclosure of property he was unable to develop or market during the Great Recession. Matheny’s failure to succeed in real estate was the proximate cause of his return to baseball as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. Matheny’s story provides the backdrop for examining the methods by …

Alms To The Rich: The Facade Easement Deduction, Wendy G. Gerzog

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This article presents the case for repeal of the façade easement deduction. Proponents of this benefit argue that the deduction encourages historic preservation by reimbursing property owners for relinquishing their right to alter the façade of their property in a way inconsistent with that conservation goal; however, this article shows that there are many reasons to urge its repeal: the revenue loss, the small number of beneficiaries, the financial demographics of that group of beneficiaries; the dubious industries that are supported by the deduction; and the continual marked overvaluation and abuse despite Congressional, court, and administrative review and expense.

After …