Law Commons^™

Rules Of The Road: The Struggle For Safety And The Unmet Promise Of Federalism, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

American streets have become increasingly dangerous. 2020 saw the highest year-over-year increase in roadway death rates in 96 years, and the last year for which we have data on non-drivers, 2018, was the was the deadliest year for pedestrians and cyclists in three decades. Though this resurgence of road violence has many complex causes, what makes American roads uniquely deadly are laws that lock in two interrelated design problems: unfriendly streets and unsafe vehicles.

Design standards articulate how streets and vehicles look and function. As they have been enshrined in law, they favor drivers and their passengers over any other …

The Half-Earth City, Timothy Beatley, Jd Brown

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

At the intersection of the biophilic city and the global commitment to halt biodiversity declines lies the half-earth city.

E.O. Wilson inspired the global effort to conserve and restore half the Earth, to sustain remaining biodiversity, necessarily focused on areas where the human footprint is small and the conversion of land to anthropogenic land use is less pronounced. However, given the increasing urbanization of the globe, cities must also play a central role in the conservation of global biodiversity. Holistic ecoregional planning must account for the impact of cities and work to ensure that urban areas are built in harmony …

Foreword: Sustainability In The City, Julia D. Mahoney

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

“Nature loves to hide,” observed ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus roughly 2,500 years ago, and the worldwide “COVID-19” pandemic that followed the emergence of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 at the end of 2019 has served as a bracing reminder of humanity’s incomplete understanding of the natural world. The COVID-19 crisis has turned out to be more than a public health emergency rooted in natural causes, for the pandemic has revealed significant weaknesses in humancreated institutions, including those that govern and influence the urban areas in which most Americans now live.

Of course, with crisis comes opportunity, and it seems highly plausible …

The Impact Of Municipal Fiscal Crisis On Equitable Development, Christopher J. Tyson

Journal Articles

The article focuses on how redevelopment authorities and land banks (RALBs) are especially vulnerable to municipal fiscal distress given investment and coordination necessary to bring about meaningful, impactful equitable development require a level of resource deployment most local governments. It mentions powers of public finance authority, distressed property management, code enforcement and blight elimination. It also mentions resources necessary to do urban planning, community engagement.

Towards An Urban Disability Agenda, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

The overwhelming majority of Americans with disabilities live in metropolitan areas. Yet those areas continue to contain significant barriers that keep disabled people from fully participating in city life. Although political and social debate has periodically turned its attention to urban issues or problems — or even the so-called “urban crisis” — during the past several decades, it has too rarely attended to the issues of disability access. When political debate has focused on disability issues, it has tended to address them in a nationally uniform way, without paying attention to the particular concerns of disabled people in cities. Even …

The Making Of Urban Applied Statistics With Four Of Juergensmeyer's Theoretical Insights, Wellington Migliari

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

The present article delves deeper into four academic contributions written by the emeritus professor Julian Conrad Juergensmeyer, Ben F. Johnson Jr. Chair in Law and Director, Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth. Co-authoring relevant publications on spatial issues from different perspectives, we identify four valuable insights accumulated along four decades dedicated to industrial co-operation, planning costs, land use and infrastructure development. All of them combined can make what we denominate an urban developmental mind. It is a strategic sequence of ideas involving urban planning, economics and law as a complex yet inevitable amalgamation of knowledge for human development. …

Beyond Green Infrastructure - Integrating The Ecosystem Services Framework Into Urban Planning Law And Policy, J.B. Ruhl

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Beyond Green Infrastructure--Integrating The Ecosystem Services Framework Into Urban Planning Law And Policy, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Despite the heavy emphasis in legal scholarship on federal and state governance of environmental policy, cities have had their champions as well. Legal scholars who stand out as having defined a position for local governance in the environmental domain include John Nolan, Jamison Colburn, Keith Hirokawa, Tony Arnold, and, on any such list, Julian Juergensmeyer. Indeed, in the United States and many other nations, cities have been leaders in many of the looming issues of environmental policy, including those with global dimensions, like climate change mitigation, and surely those with local focus, like climate change adaptation. In the United States, …

Comprehensive Rezonings, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Of all powers given to local governments, the power to zone is one of the most significant. Zoning dictates everything that gets built in a locality—and thus effectively dictates all of the key activities that take place within it. Nationwide, most zoning codes were adopted in the first half of the twentieth century. Many, including the zoning codes of New York City and Chicago, were significantly revised in the 1960s. While these codes have been revised piecemeal, just a few American cities have undergone a comprehensive revision: replacing the old code with a completely new one.

A comprehensive rezoning can …

Environmental Determinism: Functional Egalitarian Spaces Promote Functional Egalitarian Practices, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Egalitarian, place-based thinking belongs at the table when considering approaches to improving early childhood. Places connect people’s lives. They also generate patterns that organize, and can re-organize, our social order and behavior. Places can spark and support the development of self-governance and cultivate a political voice grounded in the needs of the same community that place generates. Whether considered as community schools, community centers, or more ambitiously, community housing developments designed to include services that meet the needs of residents, the spatial dimensions of early childhood policy require explicit consideration.

Bike Lanes, Not Cars: Mobility And The Legal Fight For Future Los Angeles, Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

In 2015, the City of Los Angeles adopted the controversial Mobility Plan 2035. The Plan restructures city transportation planning by emphasizing alternatives to cars for the next twenty years. Predictably, bike lanes became its most polemic aspect. The Plan envisions dramatic increases in bike lanes throughout car-obsessed Los Angeles. This bike lane increase was challenged in court, with objectors claiming that eliminating car lanes would increase congestion and compromise air quality. These arguments are ironic, since environmental justifications typically motivate bike projects.

The Mobility Plan illustrates how law supports and challenges bike lane projects. This Article argues that although this …

Distinguishing Households From Families, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The study of the relationship between all families, whether marital or non-marital, and households, is underdeveloped, despite extensive study of the mismatch between family law, which is still focused on marriage and parenthood, and family practices. Often, in an effort to update the discourse, discussions of non-marital families seem to deploy households or living arrangements as a substitute classification in the place of the old marital family. This Article argues that we need to resist the tendency to substitute the idea of “household” when the boundaries of legal family fail us, because households are not necessarily familial, and because core …

27-10-15 Wigan Ieee Smart Cities Guadalajara Education Workshop Presentatation, Marcus R. Wigan

Marcus R Wigan

Begone, Euclid!: Leasing Custom And Zoning Provision Engaging Retail Consumer Tastes And Technologies In Thriving Urban Centers, Michael N. Widener

Pace Law Review

Is urban center retailing in a death spiral? Competition for consumers with Internet vendors is afoot; winners and losers shall be anointed. The threats to physical retailing in an era of the “Internet of Goods” initially are described below. Adaptations by tenants, landlords, and stakeholders in urban centers will be required quickly, and new perspectives and partnerships, including those among local and regional governments, are instrumental if physical retail operations in municipal cores are to survive. The balance of this article describes these needs from the vantage point of each stakeholder; but this article argues that integrating information and communication …

How Often Do Cities Mandate Smart Growth Or Green Building?, Michael Lewyn

Michael E Lewyn

Much has been written about the role of government regulation in facilitating automobile-oriented sprawl. Zoning codes reduce walkability by artificially segregating housing from commerce, forcing businesses and multifamily landlords to surround their buildings with parking, and artificially reducing density. The “smart growth” movement seeks to reverse these policies, both through regulation and through more libertarian, deregulatory policies. The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent cities have in fact chosen the former path, and to discuss the possible side effects of prescriptive smart growth and green building regulations. In particular, this paper focuses on attempts to make …

Distributional Consequences Of Public Policies: An Example From The Management Of Urban Vehicular Travel, Winston Harrington, Elena Safirova, Conrad Coleman, Sébastien Houde, Adam M. Finkel

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This paper uses a spatially disaggregated computable general equilibrium model of a large US metropolitan area to compare two kinds of policies, “Live Near Your Work” and taxation of vehicular travel, that have been proposed to help further the aims of “smart growth.” Ordinarily, policy comparisons of this sort focus on the net benefits of the two policies; that is, the total monetized net welfare gains or losses to all citizens. While the aggregate net benefits are certainly important, in this analysis we also disaggregate these benefits along two important dimensions: income and location within the metropolitan area. The resulting …

Requiem For Regulation, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

This comment reviews U.S. Supreme Court decisions over the past 100 years which have considered the constitutional limitations on governmental powers. It finds that at the three-quarter mark of the 20th century, a remarkable set of Court precedents had swollen the regulatory powers of governments while shrinking private rights to property and contract. But since the Reagan years, a more conservative Court has undertaken to curtail governmental activity in general, and to limit federal, state, and local planning in particular. A number of 5-4 decisions expanded private property rights and contracted the scope of the federal “commerce power.” The comment …

How Often Do Cities Mandate Smart Growth Or Green Building?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Much has been written about the role of government regulation in facilitating automobile-oriented sprawl. Zoning codes reduce walkability by artificially segregating housing from commerce, forcing businesses and multifamily landlords to surround their buildings with parking, and artificially reducing density. The “smart growth” movement seeks to reverse these policies, both through regulation and through more libertarian, deregulatory policies. The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent cities have in fact chosen the former path, and to discuss the possible side effects of prescriptive smart growth and green building regulations. In particular, this paper focuses on attempts to make …

Requiem For Regulation, Garrett Power

Garrett Power

This comment reviews U.S. Supreme Court decisions over the past 100 years which have considered the constitutional limitations on governmental powers. It finds that at the three-quarter mark of the 20th century, a remarkable set of Court precedents had swollen the regulatory powers of governments while shrinking private rights to property and contract. But since the Reagan years, a more conservative Court has undertaken to curtail governmental activity in general, and to limit federal, state, and local planning in particular. A number of 5-4 decisions expanded private property rights and contracted the scope of the federal “commerce power.” The comment …

A Cidade E A Copa: Exceções Do Estado E Do Direito Em Favor Da Fifa, Rafael De Oliveira Alves

Rafael de Oliveira Alves

Resumo Este trabalho pretende apresentar elementos para análise da cidade contemporânea e suas transformações para receber um megaevento esportivo: a Copa do Mundo Fifa 2014. O texto apoia-se na sistematização proposta por Edward Soja (2008). Logo, [1] os processos de reestruturação pós-fordistas, [2] a segregação socioespacial e [3] os mecanismos de encarceramento são categorias importantes para compreender as transformações urbanísticas nas cidades que serão sede de jogos de futebol em 2014 no sentido da constituição de um Estado de exceção. Pretendemos identificar as mudanças do Estado e do Direito para atender os interesses da Fifa e do capital. Assim, elencaremos …

Moderating Citizen "Visioning" In Town Comprehensive Planning: Deliberative Dialog Processes, Michael N. Widener

Michael N. Widener

This paper describes one method of mediated collective bargaining addressing opposing stakeholder views in a Comprehensive Land Use Plan amendment processes where stakeholders provide inputs on behalf of a diverse stakeholders’ community. The moderation process described here involves the City of Scottsdale, Arizona, currently engaged in developing its 2014 Plan extending the city’s planning vision through 2045.

The 2012 Environmental Law Symposium: California's Urban Wildlands: Cities As Habitat, Golden Gate University School Of Law

Environmental Law Symposia

Welcome to the 2012 Environmental Law Symposium, held in conjunction with ENVIRONMENTAL LAW JOURNAL the publication of this year's edition of the Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal's Symposium: The City as Habitat: A Place for Urban Wildlands. This edition and our Symposium bring to the stage discussions of California's urban habitats, including the Presidio's Crissy Field in San Francisco, the Ballona Wetlands in Playa Del Ray in Southem California, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, and many others. Today we join many urban planning circles in the discussion on preserving a prominent place for greenspace and wildlife habitat amongst the …

From Bricks And Mortar To Mega-Bytes And Mega-Pixels: The Changing Landscape Of The Impact Of Technology And Innovation On Urban Development, Patricia E. Salkin

Patricia E. Salkin

This article reflects upon the impact that technology and innovation has had on urban development. From NASA's Landstat program, to Google maps and GPS, technology has had a significant impact on urban planning and land use law. The article begins with a discussion of the impact of the elevator and steel technologies on urban architecture and density, and then moves to changes in transportation such as the automobile and the development of public transportation systems. Green buildings, GIS, satellite data, online mapping, personal computers, the Internet and cell phones are all examined.

From Bricks And Mortar To Mega-Bytes And Mega-Pixels: The Changing Landscape Of The Impact Of Technology And Innovation On Urban Development, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

This article reflects upon the impact that technology and innovation has had on urban development. From NASA's Landstat program, to Google maps and GPS, technology has had a significant impact on urban planning and land use law. The article begins with a discussion of the impact of the elevator and steel technologies on urban architecture and density, and then moves to changes in transportation such as the automobile and the development of public transportation systems. Green buildings, GIS, satellite data, online mapping, personal computers, the Internet and cell phones are all examined.

Fostering Regionalism: Comment On "The Promise And Perils Of 'New Regionalist' Approaches To Sustainable Communities", Nestor M. Davidson

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This brief comment, written in response to Professor Lisa Alexander's, "The Promise and Perils of 'New Regionalist' Approaches to Sustainable Communities," reviews Professor Alexander's assessment of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program. This comment suggests that although the ability to approach regionalism from a national perspective does not ensure that local power dynamics will not be replicated, the distance and independence that the federal perspective provides may in fact be a cause for optimism, particularly for those marginalized at the local level.

Human Rights And Development For India's Rural Remnant: A Capabilities-Based Assessment, Lisa Pruitt

Lisa R Pruitt

The cachet that India currently enjoys on the world stage is linked largely to the booming high-tech and service economies associated with its megacities. Yet in terms of sheer numbers, India is not an urban nation. About a third of India’s population lives in urban areas, though that figure is rising quickly. One projection indicates that thirty-one villagers will continue to show up in an Indian city every minute over the next forty-three years — 700 million people in all.

Lack of sustainable development in rural areas is a major force behind the massive rural-to-urban migration across Asia. An enormous …

Bozung V. Lafco: Municipal Boundary Changes And The California Environmental Quality Act, Henry Michael Domzalski Ii

Golden Gate University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sprawl, Family Rhythms, And The Four-Day Work Week, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

We evaluate the four-day work week against the background of other institutional and social practices and constraints. But we fix these other variables when considering the value of this work reform. For example, workers enjoy the commute time and expense savings associated with a four-day week. These savings would mean little if the commutes in question were negligible. Therefore, the value of the four-day work week depends in part on the social history that gave us increasingly substantial commutes. This Article seeks to highlight some of the institutional practices that influence the adoption of a four-day work week, particularly those …

State Of Maryland V. Louis Hyman: Did Progressivism, Concern For Public Health, And The Great Baltimore Fire Influence The Court Of Appeals?, Justin Haas

Legal History Publications

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, increased immigration from eastern Europe and a growing garment industry in Baltimore led to vast growth in so-called sweatshops: cramped workspaces in which clothing was partially or completely sewn for market. As the sweatshops grew, integrated clothing factories were also emerging, finally becoming a real force in the Baltimore garment industry around the turn of the twentieth century. As the integrated factories grew, the workers joined in the growing organized labor movement, and then began to push for greater protections for the health and safety of workers, as well as fair wages. …

Green V. Garrett: How The Economic Boom Of Professional Sports Helped To Create, And Destroy, Baltimore’S Memorial Stadium, Jordan Vardon

Legal History Publications

Buildings, like people, have lives all their own. They have beginnings, middles, ends, and even good and bad years. This project is a study of a building known by many names, including Venable Park, Mud Stadium, The Great White Elephant of 33rd St., The Old Gray Lady, and the World’s Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum, although for most of its life it was officially referred to as Memorial Stadium, located in Baltimore, Maryland.

The story of Memorial Stadium is really the story of those in the community that surround it. As the use and popularity of the Stadium grew, so too …