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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Property And Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve And A Canadian City, Douglas C. Harris
Property And Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve And A Canadian City, Douglas C. Harris
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Property rights, wrote Morris Cohen in 1927, are delegations of sovereign power. They are created by the state and operate to establish limits on its power. As such, the allocation of property rights is an exercise of sovereignty and a limited delegation of it. Sixty years later, Joseph Singer used Cohen’s conceptual framing in a critical review of developments in American Indian law. Where the US Supreme Court had the opportunity to label an American Indian interest as either a sovereign interest or a property interest, he argued, it invariably chose to the disadvantage of the Indians. Within Canada, Indigenous …
A Railway, A City, And The Public Regulation Of Private Property: Cpr V. City Of Vancouver, Douglas C. Harris
A Railway, A City, And The Public Regulation Of Private Property: Cpr V. City Of Vancouver, Douglas C. Harris
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The doctrine of regulatory or constructive taking establishes limits on the public regulation of private property in much of the common law world. When public regulation becomes unduly onerous — so as, in effect, to take a property interest from a private owner — the public will be required to compensate the owner for its loss. In 2000, the City of Vancouver passed a by-law that limited the use of a century-old rail line to a public thoroughfare. The Canadian Pacific Railway, which owned the line, claimed the regulation amounted to a taking of its property for which the city …