Law Commons^™

A Seat At Whose Table? Analyzing Detroit’S Community Benefit Ordinance As A Tool For Environmental Justice, Sarah Draughn Gargaro

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as the “just treatment and meaningful involvement” of all people in the decisionmaking that affects the environment and human health. Since the origins of the modern American environmental justice movement in the 1980s, activists have emphasized the importance of self-determination. Environmental justice requires that decision making processes center the voices of the individuals impacted by decisions made about the distributions of environmental assets and harms. There is a significant challenge, however, in designing community engagement practices that meaningfully involve community members. Since the 1990s, community benefits agreements have been heralded as an effective …

Dispossessing Resident Voice: Municipal Receiverships And The Public Trust, Juliet M. Moringiello

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The residents of struggling cities suffer property dispossessions both as individual owners and as municipal residents. Their individual dispossessions are part of a cycle that often begins with industrial decline. In Detroit, for example, more than 100,000 residents have lost their homes to tax foreclosure over a four-year period that bracketed the city’s bankruptcy filing. Falling property values, job losses, and foreclosures affect municipal budgets by reducing tax revenues. As individual dispossessions exacerbate municipal financial crises, residents can also face the loss of municipal property. Struggling cities and towns often sell publicly owned property—from parks to parking systems—to balance municipal …

Dispossessing Detroit: How The Law Takes Property, Mary Kathlin Sickel

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Introduction for the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform's Symposium “Dispossessing Detroit: How the Law Takes Property,” hosted on November 9 and 10, 2019.

Assessing Access-To-Justice Outreach Strategies, J. J. Prescott

Articles

The need for prospective beneficiaries to “take up” new programs is a common stumbling block for otherwise well-designed legal and policy innovations. I examine the take-up problem in the context of publicly provided court services and test the effectiveness of various outreach strategies that announce a newly available online court access platform. I study individuals with minor arrest warrants whose distrust of courts may dampen any take-up response. I partnered with a court to quasi-randomly assign outreach approaches to a cohort of individuals and find that outreach improves take-up, that the type of outreach matters, and that online platform access …

Utilizing Michigan Brownfield Policies To Incentivize Community-Based Urban Agriculture In Detroit, Nicholas Leonard

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

As residents have increasingly moved from urban centers to suburbs, several cities have not been able to create effective solutions to the problems that such population loss has presented. Abandoned properties have proven to be the primary problem, and nowhere is that problem more pronounced than in Detroit. Urban agriculture has been widely embraced on a grassroots level as a potential solution to the pervasive problems that abandoned properties present and that cities have been unable to solve. While urban agriculture networks have largely arisen outside of municipal control, several cities are beginning to recognize urban agriculture as a potential …

Detroit's Real Challenge, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

When Detroit became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy, it was a bad thing—unless you have the unique world-view of a bankruptcy lawyer, in which case it was marvelous news, worthy of celebration.

Community Development Banking Strategy For Revitalizing Our Communities, Rochelle E. Lento

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

CDCUs and CDLFs may outnumber CDBs, but their scope of lending activity pales in comparison. Despite CDBs' relatively small number, their impact on their respective communities warrants an in-depth discussion of their structures and formulas for success. This Article will provide an overview of the CDBs in the United States. Part I first sets forth the legal structure and purpose of CDBs, and then reviews the history and current status of mature CDBs and emerging CDBs. Part II considers community development credit unions, after which Part III gives community development loan funds similar treatment. Finally, Part IV analyzes the potential …

Trial And Error: The Detroit School Segregation Case, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Trial and Error: The Detroit School Segregation Case by Eleanor P. Wolf

Frank Murphy: The Detroit Years, George Edwards

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Frank Murphy: The Detroit Years by Sidney Fine

Some Observations On The Disposition Of Ccw Cases In Detroit, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this Note details the disposition of cases alleging violations of the Michigan CCW statute that were brought in the Detroit recorder's court during 1973. Although the statute is only part of the current scheme of gun control in Michigan, it is the principal weapon available to the police and prosecutor in the preventive battle against the illegal use of firearms. To give meaning to the dispositional statistics and to aid in perceiving the over-all judicial attitude toward CCW cases, the statistical results of the study are compared with statistics on the disposition of cases involving felonies similar …

State Management Of The Environment Part Two: A Continuing Evaluation Of The Michigan Experience, Geoffrey J. Lanning

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In Part One of this article, the author outlined the scope and character of Michigan's environmental problems and suggested some of the factors underlying the state's weak and bureaucratic decisionmaking process. Part Two concludes the author's analysis of the fundamental obstacles to effective environmental decisionmaking in Michigan, and Part Three will contain recommendations for reform.

Constitutional Law--Equal Protection--Minimum Age Requirement For Candidates For Detroit Common Council Violates Equal Protection Clause Of Fourteenth Amendment--Manson V. Edwards*, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Recent Development will discuss the validity and potential impact of the court's selection of the compelling interest test to measure the compliance of Detroit's age restriction on candidacy with the fourteenth amendment. It will also explore the possible state goals sought to be achieved by requiring a minimum age for candidates and examine whether these goals can be viewed as "compelling governmental interests."

Modern Legislation, Metropolitan Court, Miniscule Results: A Study Of Detroit's Landlord-Tenant Court, Marilyn Miller Mosier, Richard A. Soble

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This article is a description of a study of cases filed and tried in the Detroit, Michigan, Common Pleas Court, Landlord-Tenant Division, during 1970 and 1971. The court is in a large urban center and handles a high volume of cases, in most of which one or both parties appear without an attorney. The impetus for the study was Michigan legislation passed in 1968, which gave tenants additional defenses to summary eviction procedures. The main goal of the study was to observe the effects of the legislation on tenants who were subject to summary proceedings in Detroit. The purpose of …

Detroit Housing Code Enforcement And Community Renewal: A Study In Futility, Brett R. Dick, John S. Pfarr Jr.

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This article will demonstrate that the inconsistency is, to a large extent, more apparent than real and results from the application of two different conceptions of the purpose of the program to the same facts. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that Detroit's Building (housing) Code has failed in its attempt to force rehabilitation of residential structures through Code enforcement. Although it can be made to work more efficiently, the Code will never serve as an effective solution to the housing problem.

The Administration Of Justice In The Wake Of The Detroit Civil Disorder Of July 1967, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Early Sunday morning, July 23, 1967, the Detroit Police Department raided a "blind pig" at the corner of Twelfth Street and Clairmont Street. An unexpectedly large number of patrons were present at the after-hours drinking establishment, and it took the police over an hour to remove them all from the scene. The weather was warm and humid-despite the time, many people were still on the streets. A crowd of about two hundred gathered while the police were occupied with the individuals arrested in the raid. The last of the arrestees were removed shortly after 5:00 a.m. At that moment an …

Municipal Corporations-Circumventing Municipal Debt Limitations, Joseph F. Gricar S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

Since municipalities are frequently indebted to the permissible extent of the constitutional, statutory, and charter debt limitations, they are constantly seeking methods of finance which avoid the debt limits. Three devices have received judicial sanction. First: Where a separate and distinct. corporation such as a school or drain district has been created it may operate with a separate debt limit over the same territory as the governing municipality. Second: Where the project to be financed is income-producing, the financing bond issue, if made self-liquidating, will not Gome within the debt limitations. Although incorporated authorities have been extensively used to administer …

Survey Of Metropolitan Courts: Detroit Area, Maxine Boord Virtue

Michigan Legal Studies Series

It has long been recognized that the social problems of the city are something more than a mere multiple of the social problems of the rural community. The bigness of the metropolitan area breeds its own difficulties, which find no counterpart outside its borders. Only recently, however, have experts begun to suggest that this same uniqueness inheres in the problems of the organization of metropolitan courts.

Should the organization of the metropolitan court system differ from court organization elsewhere? How should it differ? Before these questions can be answered, we must know something of existing court organizations in metropolitan areas …

Right Of Privacy-Status Of The Law In Michigan-Liability For Commercial Use Of Photograph, Thomas L. Waterbury

Michigan Law Review

Defendant published plaintiff's photograph in connection with a cosmetics advertisement in a Detroit newspaper. Plaintiff sought damages, alleging that she neither knew of nor assented to the publication of the photograph, that the publication constituted an invasion of her right to be free from offensive publicity, and that she had suffered consequential damages. The trial court sustained defendant's motion to dismiss on the ground that the complaint stated no cause of action. On appeal, held, reversed and remanded. Plaintiff stated a cause of action for invasion of her right of privacy. Pallas v. Crowley, Milner & Co., 322 …

Unreported Michigan Supreme Court Opinions, 1836-1843, Clark F. Norton

Michigan Law Review

It is a commonly known fact that, although Michigan was admitted to the Union in 1837 (many of her citizens had claimed statehood for more than a year prior to her formal admission), few opinions of the state supreme court written before 1843 have ever been published. Why a period of almost ten years should have elapsed before the first volume of state reports was issued in 1846 ( with the exception of two volumes of chancery reports), or why the early reporters seem, from a casual examination, to have neglected decisions of the court before 1843, or what happened …

Criminal Law In Action- Carrying Concealed Weapons - Chicago Statistics, John Barker Waite

Michigan Law Review

Lawyers are beginning to recognize, though slowly, that enforcement and administration of law are affected more by the psychological conditioning and the character of its administrators than by the content of the law itself. This basis of difference is well demonstrated by some data of Chicago criminal court operations as compared with similar proceedings before Detroit judges.

Taxation Of Easements, Bradley M. Thompson

Articles

In the case of Lever v. Grant,1 the supreme court passed incidentally upon the effect of a tax deed on an easement appurtenant to the estate on which the delinquent taxes had been levied. From the facts in that case it appears that in 1884 the owner of a parcel of land in the city of Detroit, bounded on the west by Woodward avenue, platted the same. The plat shows a street on the north side extending from Woodward avenue east thirty feet wide, one-half the width of an ordinary street. This street was named Custer Avenue. The next year, …