Law Commons^™

Closing The Book On The School Trust Lands, C. Maison Heidelberg

Vanderbilt Law Review

Public education in the United States faces a crisis. Financially strapped state and local governments find funding more and more difficult to supply; as a result, the quality of public education suffers. Predictably citizens are concerned, yet they resist paying increased taxes to meet the rising costs.

School trust lands provide one potential source of extra revenue. Though their existence is not well known, these lands are tremendous assets held by most states other than the original thirteen. In general, they have produced significant amounts of revenue for public education, yet historically state management of the lands has been marred …

Privatization In Germany: A Model For Legal And Functional Analysis, Martin E. Elling

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this Article, Mr. Elling discusses the efforts to restructure and privatize the eastern German economy. The Article focuses on the work of the Trust Agency, or Treuhandanstalt, the agency primary responsible for privatizing property expropriated by the Nazis, the Soviet occupation forces, and the German Democratic Republic. These three regimes expropriated property under varying circumstances, and the Trust Agency now faces the task of determining the appropriate level of compensation or restitution for each property claimant. While the Trust Agency is concerned with awarding just compensation to the rightful property owners, the author notes that Germany designed the privatization …

Property And Liberty Reconsidered, Herman Belz

Vanderbilt Law Review

This perceptive, lucid, and sympathetic account of property rights in American constitutional law by Professor James W. Ely, Jr., is further evidence of the conservative challenge to liberal orthodoxy that has emerged in recent years in American historiography. That the book appears under the cosponsorship of the Organization of American Historians, one of the more militantly liberal scholarly associations in the United States, is a small but significant sign of the changing intellectual climate.

As conceived of in contemporary liberal historiography, protection of individual property rights is but one element of economic liberty. Equally if not more important, according to …

International Space Law: Into The Twenty-First Century, Glenn H. Reynolds

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this Article, Professor Reynolds addresses the space law issues likely to be of most importance in the next several decades. Pressing issues include those of orbital debris and geostationary orbit crowding, private property rights in outer space resources, conflict over international trade in space goods and services, the danger of ballistic-missile technology proliferation, private remote-sensing systems, and the law of international cooperation in space. Professor Reynolds concludes with a philosophical and practical discussion of some more remote issues, including the legal systems that may govern future human societies in outer space and the legal issues that might be associated …