Law Commons^™

Mitigating Catastrophe Risk For Landowners, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Local, national, and global catastrophes entail significant risk for landowners. The government-sponsored National Flood Insurance Program illustrates how subsidizing insurance against catastrophe risk can result in overinvestment in risk-prone properties. Government intervention, however, has largely been a response to the historical failure of the private insurance industry to provide adequate protection against correlated risks, a failure with the potential to generate underinvestment in land and devastate existing owners.

When data is available about the incidence and severity of potential disasters, improvements in technology have made it more feasible for insurers to calibrate premiums and discounts with greater accuracy, and sophisticated …

Inclusionary Takings Legislation, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

This Article proposes an alternative post-Kelo legislative reform effort called “inclusionary takings.” Like inclusionary zoning legislation, inclusionary takings legislation would trigger remedial affordable housing action to mitigate the phenomenon of exclusionary condemnations in dense urban areas and declining suburban localities. An inclusionary takings statute would also mandate that local municipalities and private developers provide affordable housing in new developments benefiting from eminent domain takings. Such a statute may ameliorate the phenomenon of exclusionary condemnations in dense urban areas that displaces low-income families from urban neighborhoods. An inclusionary taking, like inclusionary zoning, in other words, requires affordable housing contributions from developers …

Resilience And Raisins: Partial Takings And Coastal Climate Change Adaptation, Joshua Galperin, Zahir Hadi Tajani

Articles

The increased need for government-driven coastal resilience projects will lead to a growing number of claims for “partial takings” of coastal property. Much attention has been paid to what actions constitute a partial taking, but there is less clarity about how to calculate just compensation for such takings, and when compensation should be offset by the value of benefits conferred to the property owner. While the U.S. Supreme Court has an analytically consistent line of cases on compensation for partial takings, it has repeatedly failed (most recently in Horne v. U.S. Department of Agriculture) to articulate a clear rule. The …

The Field In Ireland In 2014, Tom Dunne

Articles

Repossessions are an important part of recovery in the housing market

Does The Compensation Clause Burden The Government Or Benefit The Owner? The Compensation Clause As Process, Joshua Galperin

Articles

One of many ideas indelibly drawn in the legal vernacular is that “if a regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.” This workhorse of a phrase has shouldered the bulk of the regulatory takings doctrine since the first half of the last century. So much ink has been spilled in an attempt to parse the meaning of “too far,” and yet the academic and judicial communities have made little progress towards a better understanding. This article, therefore, seeks to divert some attention away from the meaning of “taking”, and put a little more focus on the …

Evolving Judicial Attitudes Toward Local Government Land Use Control, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

The year 1967 begins the second half-century of zoning in the United States. The first comprehensive zoning ordinance was adopted by New York City in 1916. In the fifty years that have elapsed, zoning has become, notwithstanding a growing disenchantment with it on the part of planners, the most widely employed technique of land use control in the United States. At the present time only Houston, of all the major cities in the United States, lacks a zoning ordinance. And, though I have not obtained precise figures, we are all familiar with the increasingly large per centage of small municipalities, …