Law Commons^™

It Takes A Village: Municipal Condemnation Proceedings And Public/Private Partnerships For Mortgage Loan Modification, Value Preservation, And Local Economic Recovery, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Respected real estate analysts forecast that the U.S. is now poised to experience a renewed round of home mortgage foreclosures over the coming six years. Up to eleven million underwater mortgages will be affected. Neither our families, our neighborhoods, nor our state and national economies can bear a resumption of crisis on this order of magnitude.

I argue that ongoing and self-worsening slump in the primary and secondary mortgage markets is rooted in a host of recursive collective action challenges structurally akin to those that brought on the real estate bubble and bust in the first place. Collective action problems …

Property, E. F. Roberts

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the past, property exemplified law as an ordered set of rules, each axiom fitting nicely into an almost immovable intellectual mosaic of immense size. This obsolete rule grid still serves a purpose. It has been pressed into service as a vehicle to test aspirants for admission to the bar, now that even the bar examiners in this Republic have succumbed to using multiple choice questions susceptible to machine scoring. The irony is that this bar examination law does not mirror the real law, the common-law model having been destroyed by the entropy that typifies this fragile society. Order has …

Property, E. F. Roberts

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

A survey can either restate the obvious or attempt to add a critical dimension to the law’s uncertain progress. The obvious can be gleaned merely by scanning the orange-covered paperback indices which go with the official advance sheets and in which cases are condensed in the best headnote hunter’s style. This exercise presupposes a reader possessed of an interest in something more than the obvious, and one who enjoys a critique of a few key cases, precisely for the challenge of making an independent judgment of whether New York property law has progressed during the past Survey year.