Law Commons^™

A World Without Roe: The Constitutional Future Of Unwanted Pregnancy, Julie Suk

Faculty Scholarship

With the demise of Roe v. Wade, the survival of abortion access in America will depend on new legal paths. In the same moment that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has constrained access to abortion in the United States, other constitutional democracies have moved in the opposite direction, expanding access to safe, legal, and free abortions. They have done so without reasoning from Roe’s vision of the private zone of unwanted pregnancy. The development of abortion law outside the United States provides critical insights that can inform future efforts to vindicate the constitutional rights of women facing unwanted pregnancies. …

Scotus In The Strait Of Messina: Steering The Course Between Private Rights And Public Powers, Donald J. Smythe

Faculty Scholarship

The greatest challenge for any civilized society is to find the appropriate balance of rights and responsibilities between the individual and society. In the United States, the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of the line between individual rights and governmental powers. The prerogatives and protections for private property rights help to define that line. The Supreme Court has developed two distinct bodies of constitutional jurisprudence bearing on the protections for private property, one under the doctrine of substantive due process and the other under the Takings Clause. But the appropriate balance has been difficult to achieve, and the Supreme …

Intratextual And Intradoctrinal Dimensions Of The Constitutional Home, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The home has been lifted to a special pantheon of rights and protections in American constitutional law. Until recently, a conception of special protections for the home in the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause was under-addressed by scholars. However, a contemporary and robust academic treatment of a home-centric takings doctrine merits a different approach to construction and interpretation: the intratextual and intradoctrinal implications of a coherent set of homebound protections across the Bill of Rights, including the Takings Clause.

Intratextualism and intradoctrinalism are interpretive methods of juxtaposing non-adjoining and adjoining clauses in the Constitution and Supreme Court doctrines to find patterns …

Environmental Law. Disrupted., Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

The U.S. regulatory environment is changing rapidly, at the same time that visible and profound impacts of climate change are already being felt throughout the world, and enormous, potentially existential threats loom in the not-so-distant future. What does it mean to think about and practice environmental law in this setting? In this latest in a biannual series of postings and essays, the authors, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative (ELC), have taken on the question of whether environmental law as we currently know it is up to the job of addressing these threats; and, if not, what the path forward …

Paying For Gun Violence, Samuel D. Brunson

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Gun violence is an outsized problem in the United States. Between a culture that allows for relatively unconstrained firearm ownership and a constitutional provision that ensures that ownership will continue to be relatively unchecked, it has proven virtually impossible for politicians to address the problem of gun violence. And yet, gun violence costs the United States tens of billions of dollars or more annually. These tens of billions of dollars are negative externalities — costs that gun owners do not bear themselves, and thus that are imposed on the victims of violence and on taxpayers generally.

What can we do …

Memo To Environmentalists: Brace For The Three Ps, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This very short essay, written as a memo to environmental advocates during a destabilizing moment in environmental law, advises them to (1) resist federal preemption of state regulation, (2) scrutinize the strategic deployment of property rights to block future regulation, and (3) think creatively about how to accomplish the goals of national-level policy without the benefit of federal authority. In short, it advises that advocates ensure that the campaign to dismantle federal environmental law does not spill over into displacing state and local efforts to fill the void. They also must push back against the strategic deployment of property rights …

Penn Central Take Two, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Penn Central v. New York City is the most important regulatory takings case of all time. There, the Supreme Court upheld the historic preservation of Grand Central Terminal in part because the City offset the burden of the landmarking with a valuable new property interest—a transferable development right (TDR)—that could be sold to neighboring property. Extraordinarily, 1.2 million square feet of those very same TDRs, still unused for over forty years, are the subject of newly resolved takings litigation. According to the complaint, the TDRs that saved Grand Central were themselves taken by the government, which allegedly wiped out their …

The New Politics Of New Property And The Takings Clause, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay offers a broad gloss on the traditional politics of property protection and then catalogues a number of ways in which those politics have been changing. In many cases, the account is of fragmentation and fracture as once stable commitments have become much more contingent and fact dependent.' Admittedly, this characterization paints with an extremely broad brush. That is both its contribution and its weakness. This short Essay deliberately simplifies the characterization of preferences across the political spectrum. Much more nuanced definitions would better track the complexity of the underlying issues. Judges and scholars discussed below might also object …

New Era Of Lavish Land Grants: Taking Public Property For Private Use And Brandt Revocable Trust V. United States, Danaya C. Wright

UF Law Faculty Publications

J.R. Pole's new book, Contract and Consent: Representation and the Jury in Anglo-American Legal History, is a delightful romp through centuries of Anglo-American history, law, and political theory. It would be better titled Contract, Consent, Juries, Sovereignty, and the State: A History of the Anglicization of Western Political Ideas. But in any event, this delightful set of essays, some more closely linked together than others, spans a breathtaking set of ideas--from sovereignty to the social compact to slavery to the moral agency of juries--through a breathtaking set of sources--from Slade's Case to Shakespeare to Aquinas to Faust to …

The Takings Clause, Version 2005: The Legal Process Of Constitutional Property Rights, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

The search for coherence in takings jurisprudence has resulted in a multitude of theories but no consensus. Each theory -- whether based on conceptions of common law property rights or constitutional conceptions of justice, or based on utility, natural law, or communitarian or republican conceptions of the good --offers significant insight into the vexing legal, political, and normative issues that judicial enforcement of the Takings Clause raises. But no single theory of property or of constitutional limits on state regulation and expropriation has proven capable either of satisfactorily rationalizing existing takings law or of persuading the courts or the theory's …

Not All Property Is Created Equal: Why Modern Courts Resist Applying The Takings Clause To Patents, And Why They Are Right To Do So, Davida H. Isaacs

Faculty Scholarship

After a century of disregard, the question of whether patents are entitled to protection under the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause has recently become a topic of scholarly and judicial debate. While one might have expected this issue to have been settled long before, it is only the recent burgeoning of patentholders' regulatory takings claims that has made this question one of pressing interest. Thus far scholarship on the issue has focused on whether or not patents have historically been characterized as property. Meanwhile, last year's rejection by the Federal Circuit of a patentholder's right to assert a Takings Clause claim …

Eminent Domain Legislation Post-Kelo: A State Of The States, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

In Kelo v. City of New London, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of eminent domain for economic development is a permissible“public use” under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The decision proved controversial, as many feared that it would benefit large corporations at the expense of individual homeowners and local communities. Shortly thereafter, numerous states introduced legislation limiting the use of eminent domain.This article surveys those state initiatives that have been signed into law following the Court’s decision in Kelo.

U.S. Supreme Court’S 2004 Term Includes Significant Land Use Decisions With A Trilogy Of Takings Cases, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Meaning Of Value: Assessing Just Compensation For Regulatory Takings, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article argues that valuing compensation provides just such a window into deeper theories of takings, revealing a host of considerations that map on to specific approaches to takings law. 4 Moreover, compensation rules properly applied can advance the substantive goals of various takings regimes. At the least, since the range of monetary values that can be assigned to takings claims corresponds to diverse social values, compensation rules should be applied consistently with core constitutional values. This Article therefore argues that the adequacy of compensation cannot be determined in the abstract but must rather be judged by how effectively a …

Regulatory Taxings, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The tension between the Supreme Court's expansive reading of the Takings Clause and the state's virtually limitless power to tax has been repeatedly noted, but has received little systematic exploration. Although some scholars, most notably Richard Epstein, have used the tension between takings law and taxes to argue against the legitimacy of taxation as it is presently practiced, such an approach has failed to gain a significant following. Instead, the broad legal consensus is that legislatures effectively have unlimited authority to impose tax burdens. Nevertheless, this Article demonstrates that every attempt to formulate a "Reconciling Theory," a theory that would …

The Federalist Dimension Of Regulatory Takings Jurisprudence, Stewart E. Sterk

Faculty Articles

Conventional wisdom teaches that the Supreme Court's takings doctrine is a muddle. Appearances, however, are deceiving. The "property" protected by the Takings Clause is defined not by a single sovereign, but by the legislative enactments and judicial pronouncements of fifty separate states. As a result, federalism concerns - underappreciated in the takings literature - do and should play an important role in shaping the Court's takings doctrine. In particular, these concerns make it inappropriate for the Court to use the Takings Clause as a vehicle for articulating a comprehensive theory of the limits on government power to regulate land. This …

The Inevitable Failure Of Nuisance-Based Theories Of The Takings Clause: A Reply To Professor Claeys, Stewart E. Sterk

Faculty Articles

Rejecting the proposition (advanced by Professor Eric Claeys) that the Rehnquist Court's conservatives have missed an opportunity to transform takings law, this commentary demonstrates that a nuisance-based theory cannot provide a comprehensive basis for takings clause jurisprudence. The commentary further establishes that no plausible vision of originalism supports a nuisance based theory, and concludes by arguing that judicial scrutiny of state and local land use practices is less deferential than it was at the inception of the Rehnquist Court.

Palazzolo V. Rhode Island: The Supreme Court's Expansion Of Subsequent Owners' Rights Under The Takings Clause (Symposium: The Thirteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Leon D. Lazer

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Jurisdictional Issues Arising From Eastern Enterprises V. Apfel, Richard Henry Seamon

Articles

No abstract provided.

Two- And Three-Dimensional Property Rights, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Problem Of Federal-Private Split Mineral Estates: Who Has Control?, David B. Shaver, Andrew C. Mergen, Scott W. Hardt, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

The Problem of Federal-Private Split Mineral Estates: Who Has Control? (April 23)

19 pages.

Includes footnotes.

Collection of 3 papers presented at the Hot Topics in Natural Resources Law program held on April 23, 1996.

Contents: National Park Service regulation of private mineral estates / David B. Shaver -- Recent litigation regarding federal split estates : who has control? what are the limits? / Andrew C. Mergen -- The problem of federal-private split mineral estates / Scott W. Hardt

Many federally owned lands overlie privately owned oil and gas and mineral rights. Increasingly, the competition between agency multiple use directives and private interests in resource development has resulted in legal battles between …

"Takings" Jurisprudence In The U.S. Supreme Court: The Past 10 Years, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No area of American property law has been more controversial in recent years than the government regulation of uses of private property. No aspect of American constitutional law more sharply poses the dilemma about the legitimate powers of the regulatory state than the requirement that the government pay compensation for takings of property. The purpose of this essay is to acquaint the non-American legal scholar who is unfamiliar with the recent developments in the United States Supreme Court “takings” jurisprudence. The essay does not presuppose any background knowledge about either American constitutional or property law. Instead it attempts to familiarize …

Has The U.S. Supreme Court Finally Drained The Swamp Of Takings Jurisprudence? The Impact Of Lucas V. South Carolina Coastal Council On Wetlands And Coastal Barrier Beaches, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article argues that the Court's reliance on the law of property neither creates an internal inconsistency in takings law nor necessarily leads to further destruction of natural resources. Background principles of property law, such as custom and public trust, have long provided a basis for government protection of the public's interest in certain types of land, like the barrier beach David Lucas sought to develop.

Thus, the Lucas case need not be perceived as casting a constitutional cloud over laws protecting important ecosystems like wetlands and barrier beaches. The decision may not place these resources in greater danger from …

Agenda: Regulatory Takings And Resources: What Are The Constitutional Limits?, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center, Byron R. White Center For The Study Of American Constitutional Law

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

Sponsored by the University of Colorado's Natural Resources Law Center and the Byron R. White Center for American Constitutional Study.

Conference organizers, faculty and/or moderators included University of Colorado School of Law professors David H. Getches, Lawrence J. MacDonnell, Gene R. Nichol, Jr. and Mark Squillace.

Governmental regulation for environmental protection and other important public purposes can affect the manner in which land and natural resources are developed and used. The U.S. constitution (and most state constitutions) prohibit the government from "taking" property without payment of compensation. Originally intended to apply to situations where the government physically seized private property …

Conference On The 1992 Cable Tv Act - 1994, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

The CITI conference organizers have asked me to address the constitutionality of sections 12 and 19 of the new Cable Television Act. Speaking quite generally, these provisions purport to promote competition in the distribution of programming by prohibiting certain exclusive licenses and by prohibiting certain behaviors that could lead to exclusive licenses.

The Social Origins Of Property, Jack M. Beermann, Joseph William Singer

Faculty Scholarship

The takings clause of the United States Constitution requires government to pay compensation when private property is taken for public use.' When government regulates, but does not physically seize, property, the Supreme Court of the United States has had trouble defining when individuals have been deprived of property rights so as to give them a right to compensation. The takings clause serves "to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens that, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole."' To determine when a regulation amounts to a "taking" of property …

Takings, Narratives, And Power, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

"The Regulatory Takings Problem" is the title given to a story, or narrative, that has become prominent in the literature on just compensation issues. The story is one of power and fear. It is about a perceived imbalance of power between the two groups of actors involved in the process of public land-use regulation--private landowners and government regulators. It depicts scenarios of past or threatened abuse of power by local land-use regulators, and it looks to the takings clause generally and regulatory takings doctrine specifically as crucial corrective devices, essential to set the power imbalance aright. The dominant narrative describes …

Rent Seeking And The Compensation Principle, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The reaction to Richard Epstein's Takings has been almost universally negative. Joseph Sax finds Epstein the "prisoner of an intellectual style so confining and of a philosophy so rigid that he has disabled himself from seeing problems as beyond the grasp of mere formalism." Thomas Grey concludes that "Takings belongs with the output of the constitutional lunatic fringe" and is "a travesty of constitutional scholarship." Thomas Ross, writing in this Law Review, says that, at least from an academic perspective, Takings is "a patent and howling failure." Epstein has provoked even the student editors of the Harvard Law Review …

Intergenerational Condemnation, Donald H. Gjerdingen

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Justice between generations is a growing concern in land use, particularly in the areas of environmental and historic preservation. In this Article, Professor Gerdingen addresses the effect of this development on contemporary takings clause doctrine. He argues that conventional takings doctrine is comprised of four different "causes of action" that merely focus on intragenerational conflicts over the use of resources. As a result, part of the reason why the law generates so many hard cases in the area of environmental and historic preservation is that the conventional takings doctrine is unable to accommodate the justice between generations component of preservation …

The Concept Of Property In Private And Constitutional Law: The Ideology Of The Scientific Turn In Legal Analysis, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In recent academic writing on the general problem of constitutional protection of property under the takings clause and due process clauses, a mode of analysis has emerged that is evidently different from the conventional analysis of constitutional property claims. In general terms, this new mode is characterized by an effort to analyze claims on an openly teleological and systematic basis. To be sure, this mode is not exclusively of recent origin. But it is a discernible trend in the body of scholarship that discusses constitutional protection of property in the context of previously unfamiliar sorts of private economic interests.

Most …