Law Commons^™

Creating Land With Artificial Oyster Rings: Legal Challenges From State Owned Bottom Land To Living Shorelines, Faith Parker, Will Reach

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

The Virginia Sea Grant program approached VCPC to conduct research in partnership with the William & Mary Public Policy Program and a James Madison University (JMU) architecture professor, Jori Erdman. Professor Erdman is researching the viability of creating land with artificial oyster rings based on similar projects seen in Louisiana. Professor Erdman has provided the diagrams of the project used throughout this paper. Ultimately, this paper examines some legal issues raised by the use of these rings to prevent coastal erosion or act as a flooding buffer for commercial or residential buildings. With this goal in mind, this paper addresses …

Heirs' Property In Virginia: Filling In The Gaps, J. Noble Pearson, Lillian Coward

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

The term heirs’ property refers to land that has been passed down informally for multiple generations through intestate succession. Each generation of intestate succession can drastically increase the number of heirs who own the property as tenants-in-common to the point that many may not even know their heirship status. This clouds the title to the property and makes ownership more fractionalized. Because heirs’ property exists outside of the official estate and title systems, owners are vulnerable both at the community and individual levels for three main reasons.

First, and most importantly, heirs’ property is a leading cause of involuntary Black …

Comparing & Contrasting Economic And Natural Law Approaches To Policymaking, Eric Kades

Faculty Publications

Eric Claeys’s monograph, Natural Property Rights, offers a comprehensive and thoughtful articulation of a general theory of property rights rooted in the natural law tradition. This detailed review compares Claeys’s work with the consequentialist law and economics perspective on property. After contrasting their objectives, assumptions, and methodologies this article concludes that, unlike more absolutist approaches, Claeys’s flavor of natural property rights places a modicum of weight on the welfare effects central to economic analysis. This restrained nod in the direction of practicality, however, does not eliminate some of the long-known weaknesses of natural law. Perhaps the most glaring gap …