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Full-Text Articles in Law
Public Ruses, James E. Krier, Christopher Serkin
Public Ruses, James E. Krier, Christopher Serkin
Articles
The public use requirement of eminent domain law may be working its way back into the United States Constitution. To be sure, the words "public use" appear in the document-and in many state constitutions as well, but the federal provision applies to the states in any event-as one of the Fifth Amendment's limitations on the government's inherent power to take private property against the will of its owners. (The other limitation is that "just compensation" must be paid, of which more later.) Any taking of private property, the text suggests, must be for public use. Those words, however, have amounted …
Uncoupling The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Uncoupling The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Articles
The law of takings couples together matters that should be treated independently. The conventional view, shared by courts and commentators alike, has been that any takings case can be resolved in one of two ways: either there is a taking and compensation is due, or there is no taking and no compensation is due. These results are fine as long as one holding or the other serves the two central concerns of the Takings Clause - eficiency and justice. But a problem arises when the two purposes behind the law of takings come into cordhct, as they readily might. It …
Making Something Out Of Nothing: The Law Of Takings And Phillips V. Washington Legal Foundation, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Making Something Out Of Nothing: The Law Of Takings And Phillips V. Washington Legal Foundation, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Articles
Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation held that interest on principal amounts deposited into IOLTA accounts is the property of the various clients who handed over the money but expressed no view as to whether the Texas IOLTA program worked a taking, or, if it did, whether any compensation was due. The debates among the justices about the meaning of private property, argued in terms of contextual and conceptual severance, are unlikely to prove fruitful. We elaborate a better approach in terms of the underlying purposes of just compensation. We conclude that efficiency and justice are best served by uncoupling matters …
The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller
The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller
Articles
If your house and fields are worth more separately, divide them; if you want to leave a ring to your child now and grandchild later, split the ownership in a trust. The American law of property encourages owners to subdivide resources freely. Hidden within the law, however, is a boundary principle that limits the right to subdivide private property into wasteful fragments. While people often create wealth when they break up and recombine property in novel ways, owners may make mistakes, or their self-interest may clash with social welfare. Property law responds with diverse doctrines that prevent and abolish excessive …
Deterrence And Distribution In The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Deterrence And Distribution In The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Articles
Supreme Court decisions over the last three-quarters of a century have turned the words of the Takings Clause into a secret code that only a momentary majority of the Court is able to understand. The Justices faithfully moor their opinions to the particular terms of the Fifth Amendment, but only by stretching the text beyond recognition. A better approach is to consider the purposes of the Takings Clause, efficiency and justice, and go anew from there. Such a method reveals that in some cases there are good reasons to require payment by the government when it regulates property, but not …
Acquirement Of Title By A Willful Trespasser And Compensation For The Trespassee, Joseph H. Drake
Acquirement Of Title By A Willful Trespasser And Compensation For The Trespassee, Joseph H. Drake
Articles
The interaction of the basic maxim of substantive law, that no man may be deprived of his property without his consent, and the correlative maxim of adjective law, that the courts will give exact compensation for property taken or destroyed, together with the more or less mechanical rules of damages depending upon the form of action used, have in their outcome gone far toward justifying the somewhat grandiloquent utterance of our legal forbears of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the "Common Law is the perfection of human wisdom." The final stage in this development is shown in the late …
Taking Of Equitable Easements For Public Use, Edgar N. Durfee
Taking Of Equitable Easements For Public Use, Edgar N. Durfee
Articles
The case of Flynn v. New York &c Railway Co., decided by the Court of Appeals of New York in April last, involves the right of an owner of land to which is appurtenant a so-called equitable easement, arising under a covenant restricting the use of other land, to compensation upon the taking of the servient land for a public use inconsistent with the restriction. A tract of land was laid out in accordance with a plan, and all, lots therein were sold and conveyed by deeds containing covenants, inter alia, that, "No building or structure for any business purpose …
The Right Of A Bona Fide Occupant Of Land To Compensation For His Improvements, Henry W. Rogers
The Right Of A Bona Fide Occupant Of Land To Compensation For His Improvements, Henry W. Rogers
Articles
It may be observed, in the first place, that the civil law afforded protection to the bona fide occupant of land, who had made useful or permanent improvements on the land, believing himself to be the true owner. The civil law never permitted one who was in the possession of land in good faith, to be turned out of his possession by the rightful owner, without any compensation for the additional value he has given to the soil by the improvements he had made; but it allowed him to off-set the value of his improvements to the extent, at least, …
Incidental Injuries From Exercise Of Lawful Rights, Thomas M. Cooley
Incidental Injuries From Exercise Of Lawful Rights, Thomas M. Cooley
Articles
In the present paper those cases will be considered in which one person suffers an injury in consequence of the exercise by another person of his legal rights. Many such cases occur in which, although the injury may be severe, the law will award no compensation, there being no tort in the case because there is an absence of that wrong the concurrence of which with damage is essential to an action. Negligence might supply the wrong, but we now speak of cases of which that is not an element.
Incidental Injuries From Exercise Of Lawful Rights, Thomas M. Cooley
Incidental Injuries From Exercise Of Lawful Rights, Thomas M. Cooley
Articles
In the present paper those cases will be considered in which one person suffers an injury in consequence of the exercise by another person of his legal rights. Many such cases occur in which, although the injury may be severe, the law will award no compensation, there being no tort in the case because there is an absence of that wrong the concurrence of which with damage is essential to an action. Negligence might supply the wrong, but we now speak of cases of which that is not an element.