Law Commons^™

Expropriation In The Name Of Rights: Transferable Development Rights (Tdrs), The Bundle Of Sticks And Chinese Politics, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

Through an in-depth empirical investigation, this article discloses for the first time how and why land reform programs in the name of empowering and enriching farmers have been serving the purpose of Chinese local governments to compromise the rights revolution in the Chinese national expropriation regime. The concept of “transferable development rights” (TDRs) is simple: development rights from one parcel of land are lifted up and transferred to another. Upon a detailed examination of land tickets in Chongqing and Chengdu, the southwestern Chinese application of TDRs, this article reveals that local governments in both cities have created schemes of land …

Exclusionary Megacities, Wendell Pritchett, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

Human beings should live in places where they are most productive, and megacities, where information, innovation, and opportunities congregate, would be the optimal choice. Yet megacities in both China and the United States are excluding people by limiting the housing supply. Why, despite their many differences, is the same type of exclusion happening in both Chinese and U.S. megacities? Urban law and policy scholars argue that Not-In-My-Back-Yard (“NIMBY”) homeowners are taking over megacities in the U.S. and hindering housing development. They pin their hopes on an efficient growth machine that makes sure “above all, nothing gets in the way of …

Rights-Weakening Federalism, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines whether federalism protects land rights in China from two dimensions. I first compare national law with local institutions of eminent domain, revealing that local governments take much more land than the national government approves, frequently violating, tweaking, and challenging national law. I next examine the impact of interjurisdictional competition on the development of local land institutions, demonstrating that local governments are weakening individual land rights for the benefits of mobile capital. Overall, Chinese federalism weakens rather than strengthens individual land rights and should be called rights-weakening federalism.

This China case also has general theoretical implications. Leading property …

Whose Lands? Which Public?: The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah Britton-Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. …

Dealing With Illegal Housing: What Can New York City Learn From Shenzhen?, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

In New York City, owners violated zoning regulations and opened up their basements, garages, and other floors to rent to people (particularly low-income immigrants) priced out of the formal market. The more than 100,000 illegal dwelling units in New York City (NYC) were referred to as “granny units,” “illegal twos or threes,” or “accessory units.” Due to the safety and habitability considerations of “alter[ing] or modif[ying] of an existing building to create an additional housing unit without first obtaining approval from the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB),” the City government devoted a lot of resources to detecting and …

The Politics Of Chinese Land: Partial Reform, Vested Interests And Small Property, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates the evolution of the Chinese land regime in the past three decades and focus on one question: why has the land use reform succeeded in the urban area, but not in the rural area? Through asking this question, it presents a holistic view of Chinese land reform, rather than the conventional "rural land rights conflict" picture. This paper argues that the so­called rural land problem is the consequence of China's partial land use reform. In 1988, the Chinese government chose to conduct land use reform sequentially: first urban and then rural. It was a pragmatic move because …

The Evolution Of Relational Property Rights: A Case Of Chinese Rural Land Reform, Shitong Qiao, Frank Upham

Faculty Scholarship

The most notable, or at least the most noted, form of property evolution has been the transfer of exclusive rights from collectives to individuals and vice versa, such as the farm collectivization in Soviet Union and the establishment of the People’s Communes in Mao’s China and their reversals. Such radical moments, however, constitute only a small part of history. For the most part, property rights evolve quietly and incrementally, which is hard to explain if we take exclusive rights as the core of property, or, to put it more generally, if we are focusing solely on the question of who …

Gaming The Past: The Theory And Practice Of Historic Baselines In The Administrative State, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl

Faculty Scholarship

Goals based on absolute targets, risk, technology, or cost are found throughout the administrative state. “Historic baselines,” a point in the past used to ground a policy goal, are just as commonplace, yet remain unexamined. Whether in budgeting or tax, criminal sentencing or environmental protection, historic baselines direct a wide range of agency activities. Their ubiquity begs some important questions. What makes baselines more attractive than other approaches for implementing regulatory goals? Conversely, when are other standard setting methods such as absolute targets and risk-based, technology-based, and cost-based standards more useful to policy makers than historic baselines? Unless one believes …

The Law And Policy Beginnings Of Ecosystem Services, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl

Faculty Scholarship

This article is an introduction to a symposium issue of the journal on ecosystem services. As the brief descriptions of recent developments make clear, the field has changed greatly since the late 1990s and there are a lot of exciting developments underway. With the partnership of the Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law, we thought it important to revisit the state of the field five years after the Stanford workshop. Thus we invited experts across the range of environmental law to Florida State for a two-day workshop assessing the current status of ecosystem services in environmental law. The results …

Building On Custom: Land Tenure Policy And Economic Development In Ghana, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

This Note addresses the intersection of customary and statutory land law in the land tenure policy of Ghana. It argues that improving the current land tenure policy demands integration of customary land law and customary authorities into the statutory system. After describing why and how customary property practices are central to the economic viability of any property system, the Note gives a brief overview of Ghana’s customary and statutory land law. The Note concludes with specific policy suggestions about how Ghana could better draw on the strength of its customary land sector.

Values In Land Use Controls: Some Problems, Robert Kramer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.