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Full-Text Articles in Oil, Gas, and Mineral Law
Ad Coelum And The Design Of Property Rights, Joseph A. Schremmer
Ad Coelum And The Design Of Property Rights, Joseph A. Schremmer
Faculty Scholarship
This Article seizes on a specific doctrinal discussion in Eric Claeys’s Natural Property Rights to argue for the importance of understanding property doctrines in the context of a system of interconnecting rules and standards and not in isolation. The ad coelum doctrine provides that land ownership entails ownership of the suprajacent airspace as well as the underlying subsurface. As Claeys’s discussion highlights, scholars disagree about the significance of ad coelum both conceptually, as to what function the rule serves in defining and allocating property, and normatively. It is only by viewing ad coelum in the context of how it interacts …
Getting Past Possession: Subsurface Property Disputes As Nuisances, Joseph A. Schremmer
Getting Past Possession: Subsurface Property Disputes As Nuisances, Joseph A. Schremmer
Faculty Scholarship
Property rights in the subsurface of land are adapting to accommodate modern activities like massive hydraulic fracturing (fracing). Property rights will need to continue adapting if they are to accommodate other developing activities like large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS). Courts and commentators rarely approach the nature of subsurface property directly. They tend instead to discuss appropriate standards for tort liability when disputes arise—for example when artificial fissures from a frac treatment extend into and drain oil or gas from a neighbor’s land. The case law and literature generally approach unauthorized subterranean invasions as trespasses. Because the tort of trespass …