Law Commons^™

No Entry To The Public Lands: Towards A Theory Of A Public Trust Servitude For A Way Over Abutting Private Land, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article explores the problem of inadequate access and why owners of private property abutting public lands cannot fence out the public if their sole or primary purpose is to deny access to public land. The reasons why such landowners should not be allowed to put up fences, even on their own land, if the effect is to hinder the public's access to public land are several. First, it is opportunistic and unjustly interferes with citizens' ability to enjoy the interest they hold in public lands. Second, it denies citizens access rights rooted in the common law. Third, and perhaps …

Grazing In Wilderness Areas, Mark Squillace

Publications

Domestic livestock grazing is naturally in tension with wilderness. Wilderness areas are not truly "untrammeled by man" when they host managed livestock grazing. Yet the compromise that allowed livestock grazing in wilderness areas was surely one of the greatest in the history of the conservation movement. Without it, Congress might never have passed a wilderness bill or designated countless wilderness areas throughout the country. The grazing exception--and the Congressional Grazing Guidelines that afford specific protections for grazers--made it possible to secure bipartisan support for wilderness bills in even the most conservative western states.

Notwithstanding this success, the ecology of some …

Federal Wild Lands Policy In The Twenty-First Century: What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, Michael Blumm, Andrew B. Erickson

Faculty Articles

The protection of federally owned wild lands, including but not limited to designated wilderness areas, has long been a cardinal element of the American character. For a variety of reasons, designating wild lands for protection under the Wilderness Act has proved difficult, increasingly so in recent years. Thus, attention has focused on undesignated wild lands, that is, unroaded areas managed by the principal federal land managers, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These areas can benefit from a kind of de facto protected status if they are Forest Service areas that have been inventoried for …

The Durability Of Private Claims To Public Property, Bruce R. Huber

Journal Articles

Property rights and resource use are closely related. Scholarly inquiry about their relation, however, tends to emphasize private property arrangements while ignoring public property — property formally owned by government. The well-known tragedies of the commons and anticommons, for example, are generally analyzed with reference to the optimal form and degree of private ownership. But what about property owned by the state? The federal government alone owns nearly one-third of the land area of the United States. One could well ask: is there a tragedy associated with public property, too? If there is, here is what it might look like: …