Law Commons^™

Abuse Of Property Right Without Political Foundations: A Response To Katz, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

In an article recently published in the Yale Law Journal, Larissa Katz defends a heterodox principle of abuse of property right pursuant to which an owner abuses her rights with respect to a thing she owns if she makes an otherwise permitted decision about how to use that thing just in order to harm others, either out of spite, or for leverage. Katz grounds that principle in a novel theory of the political foundations of the institution of property ownership. This essay argues that Katz’s political theory is implausible, but that this should not doom her preferred principle of …

Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales. Though some scholars and the media have highlighted how thousands of African-Americans have lost an untold amount of property and substantial real …

A Promising Beginning, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

When I began teaching at the University of Massachusetts in August 2012, one of my first encounters was with the newly-formed UMass Law Review. The editorial staff was wrapping up its initial preparations for publishing the inaugural volume. Now, over a year later, those nascent processes have since been refined; the inaugural year is over. We are excited to say that the UMass Law Review enters its sophomore year with this current issue, affectionately dubbed “9:1”.

Discretionary Benefit Or Entitlement? Hospitality Workers And The Ownership Of Customer Tips In Australia, Amelia Gow, Andrew Frazer

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The tipping of hospitality workers by customers is an increasingly common custom in Australia. Tips are a substantial (though unquantified) part of the income of hospitality workers. Such workers are often casual and vulnerable young employees. Tipping occurs in a tripartite relationship between the business operator, the customer and the worker. It is almost completely unregulated by the labour law instruments of awards and enterprise agreements. This is a ‘regulatory space’ where labour law and consumer protection law may potentially intersect.

Who owns tips? While customers may reasonably assume that service workers will receive all the tips they leave, either …

Judicial Takings: Musings On Stop The Beach, James E. Krier

Articles

Judicial takings weren’t much talked about until a few years ago, when the Stop the Beach case made them suddenly salient. The case arose from a Florida statute, enacted in 1961, that authorizes public restoration of eroded beaches by adding sand to widen them seaward. Under the statute, the state has title to any new dry land resulting from restored beaches, meaning that waterfront owners whose land had previously extended to the mean high-tide line end up with public beaches between their land and the water. This, the owners claimed, resulted in a taking of their property, more particularly their …

The Puzzling Lack Of Cooperatives, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

Some of the most recognizable companies, including Land O'Lakes, REI, the Associated Press, Ace Hardware, and State Farm Insurance, are organized as cooperatives--firms owned by their suppliers, workers, or customers. Yet aside from isolated areas of the economy, cooperatives constitute only a small portion of American enterprise, which is otherwise dominated by investor-owned firms. Conventional wisdom assumes that firms either start as cooperatives or convert to cooperatives when cooperatives offer the highest ongoing benefits to owners, and it explains the lack of cooperatives by suggesting that cooperatives usually do not maximize ongoing benefits. This Article looks at entrepreneurs' and brokers' …

How Trade Law Changed: Why It Should Change Again, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.