Property Law and Real Estate Commons^™

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, And The Future Of Federal Housing Finance Policy: A Study Of Regulatory Privilege, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The federal government recently placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-chartered, privately owned mortgage finance companies, in conservatorship. These two massive companies are profit-driven, but as government-sponsored enterprises they also have a government-mandated mission to provide liquidity and stability to the United States mortgage market and to achieve certain affordable housing goals. How the two companies should exit their conservatorship has implications that reach throughout the global financial markets and are of key importance to the future of American housing finance policy.

While the American taxpayer will be required to fund a bailout of the two companies that will …

The Illusory Right To Abandon, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The unilateral and unqualified nature of the right to abandon (at least as it is usually described) appears to make it a robust example of the law’s concern to safeguard the individual autonomy interests that many contemporary commentators have identified as lying at the heart of the concept of private ownership. The doctrine supposedly empowers owners of chattels freely and unilaterally to abandon them by manifesting the clear intent to do so, typically by renouncing possession of the object in a way that communicates the intent to forgo any future claim to it. A complication immediately arises, however, due to …

The Truth About Property Rules: Some Obstacles To The Economic Analysis Of Remedies, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Property Rules, as famously described by Calabresi and Melamed, are remedial rules that place a prohibitively high penalty on violations of rights. This essay examines two aspects of property rules. In each case, the form of the rule is critically important. The first question addressed is the capacity of property rules to affect behavior that takes place outside the context of litigation. Most economic analysis assumes that when a right is protected by a property rule, the property rule will guide private decisionmaking at the time of a contemplated violation, and possibly before that time. Yet, to have this effect, …

The Need For A National Civil Justice Survey Of Incidence And Claiming Behavior, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Civil justice issues play a prominent role in society. Family law issues such as divorce and child custody, consumer victimization issues raised by questionable trade practices, and tort issues raised by surprisingly high estimated rates of medical malpractice, questionable prescription drug practices, and other behaviors are part of the fabric of daily life. Policymakers and interest groups regularly debate and assess whether civil problems are best resolved by legislative action, agency action, litigation, alternative dispute resolution, other methods, or some combination of actions. Yet we lack systematic quantitative knowledge about the primary events in daily life that generate civil justice …

Solar Rights For Texas Property Owners, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In response to Jamie France's note, A Proposed Solar Access Law for the State of Texas, Professor Bronin urges future commentators to focus on three additional areas of inquiry related to proposed solar rights regimes. Bronin argues that such proposals would be strengthened by discussion of potential legal challenges to the proposals, related political issues, and renewable energy microgrids. Ms. France’s proposal for the State of Texas includes the elimination of preexisting private property restrictions that negatively affect solar access. Bronin argues that this proposal would be strengthened by a discussion of potential challenges under federal and state takings clauses. …

A Fixer-Upper For Finance, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Three facts bear notice in connection with our current financial troubles. The first is that the First World War, before the Second began, was known as "the Great War." The second is that the global Depression that struck between those two wars, which for now we can still label "Great," commenced with the burst of a multiyear real estate price bubble prior to the 1929 stock market crash. The third is that the U.S. accordingly addressed that depression through mutually reinforcing new regimes not only of financial regulation, but also of home mortgage finance - the very reforms that brought …

Solar Rights, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The rights to access and to harness the rays of the sun - solar rights - are extremely valuable. These rights can determine whether and how an individual can take advantage of the sun’s light, warmth, or energy, and they can have significant economic consequences. Accordingly, for at least two thousand years, people have attempted to assign solar rights in a fair and efficient manner. In the United States, attempts to assign solar rights have fallen short. A quarter century ago, numerous American legal scholars debated this deficiency. They agreed that this country lacked a coherent legal framework for the …

Land Virtues, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article has two goals. First, I explore some of the descriptive and normative shortcomings of traditional law and economics discussions of the ownership and use of land. These market-centered approaches struggle in different ways with features of land that distinguish it from other "commodities." The complexity of land - its intrinsic complexity, but even more importantly the complex ways in which human beings interact with it - undermines the notion that owners will focus on a single value, such as wealth, in making decisions about their land. Adding to the equation land's "memory," by which I mean the combined …

The Social-Obligation Norm In American Property Law, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article seeks to provide in property legal theory an alternative to law-and-economics theory, the dominant mode of theorizing about property in contemporary legal scholarship. I call this alternative the social obligation theory.

I argue that American property law, both on the private and public sides, includes a social-obligation norm but that this norm has never been explicitly recognized as such nor systemically developed. I argue that a proper understanding of the social obligation explains a remarkably wide array of existing legal doctrine in American property law, ranging from the power of eminent domain to the modern public trust doctrine. …

Reply: The Complex Core Of Property, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Statement Of Progressive Property, Gregory S. Alexander, Eduardo M. Peñalver, Joseph W. Singer, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What would a progressive theory of property look like? Although such a theory might take root within any number of specific normative frameworks, this Statement of Progressive Property outlines several features progressive theories of property should have in common. The Statement argues that we should understand property as both an idea and an institution, that property confers power and shapes community, both in its legal and social dimensions, and that property should be understood as serving plural and incommensurable values whose accommodation is possible through reasoned deliberation and practical judgment.

What The New Treasury Must Do, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

After a number of heady false starts, against the backdrop of threatened financial catastrophe, Congress and the White House enacted a stopgap financial “bailout”plan early in October 2008. From that point onward the “plan” has repeatedly morphed, morphed again, and morphed back through a string of remarkably fleeting guises. One suspects this dynamic will continue, at least for a while, as a new president and Congress find their footing in the first half of 2009.

Bringing It All Back Home: How To Save Main Street, Ignore K Street, And Thereby Save Wall Street, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Properties Of Community, Gregory S. Alexander, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Theories of property presuppose conceptions of community, and of the individual's relationship to community. In contrast to the dominant theories of community at work within most Anglo-American property theorizing, which view community obligations as fundamentally instrumental and contractual, we propose in this paper a theory that views the relationship between the individual and community as constitutive and substantive. Human beings' dependence on others to flourish imposes on political communities and their individual members a shared obligation to foster and contribute to the creation and maintenance of those structures necessary for that flourishing. This obligation in turn qualifies individual rights of …

Modern Lights, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article functions as a companion to a piece, Solar Rights, recently published in the Boston University Law Review. In that piece, the author analyzed the absence of a coherent legal framework for the treatment of solar rights - the rights to access and harness the rays of the sun. The growing popularity of, and need for, solar collector technology and other solar uses calls for reform. Answering the call for reform in Solar Rights, this Article proposes a framework within which a solar rights regime might be developed. First, as a baseline, any regime must recognize the natural characteristics …

Human Genetics Studies: The Case For Group Rights, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How The Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Market Impacts Dirt Lawyers And Their Clients, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Demythologizing Property And The Illusion Of Rules: A Response To Two Friendly Critics, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Academic life can be a depressing experience. Despite the enormous amount of time many academics spend producing written scholarship, most of us have little expectation that more than a tiny handful of people will read our published work, if indeed it is read at all. And probably even fewer of us have any expectation whatsoever that the results of our often wrenching labor will be publicly aired. It is a rare occasion when an academic’s scholarship is the subject of public recognition. But oh, how we crave any sort of public commentary, favorable or critical! So, I am extremely grateful …

Property As Constitutional Myth: Utilities And Dangers, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wrestling With Muds To Pin Down The Truth About Special Districts, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Federal, state, and local governments encourage and empower special districts—board-run, special purpose local government units that are administratively and fiscally independent from general purpose local governments. Special districts receive incentives, grants, and freedom from limitations (such as limitations on tax and debt) imposed on general purpose local governments. Special districts are treated favorably because they are small in size, which theoretically means they foster democratic participation; are limited in purpose, meaning that states can tailor the special districts' powers to serve specific problems; and are viewed as efficient solutions to specific problems. Though special districts have tripled in number over …

Property Outlaws, Eduardo M. Peñalver, Sonia K. Katyal

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Most people do not hold those who intentionally flout property laws in particularly high regard. The overridingly negative view of the property lawbreaker as a wrong-doer comports with the nearly sacrosanct status of property rights within our characteristically individualist, capitalist, political culture. This dim view of property lawbreakers is also shared to a large degree by property theorists, many of whom regard property rights as a fixed constellation of allocative entitlements that collectively produce stability and order through ownership. In this Article, we seek to rehabilitate, at least to a degree, the maligned character of the intentional property lawbreaker, and …

Three Reasons Why Even Good Property Rights Cause Moral Anxiety, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Entirely apart from the substantive justification for existing private property rights, there are several reasons why property is, unavoidably, a morally uncomfortable subject.

First, legal property rights are and must be the products of determinate legal rules. As such, they inevitably will diverge in some of their applications from the moral principles that support them.

Second, property rights suffer, more than other legal rights, from problems of transition. Most or all justifications for private property envisage secure rights on which people can and will rely. As a result, there may be genuine moral value in the preservation of rights that …

Commentaries: The Ambiguous Work Of “Natural Property Rights”, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The three fascinating papers by Dick Helmholz, Jim Ely, and Mark Tushnet prompt me to ask, why was there so much talk among late 18th and 19th century American lawyers about property as a "natural" right and why has the language persisted today? More specifically, what work is the rhetoric of "natural property rights" intended to do? This is not the proper occasion for developing anything like complete answers to those questions, but I do want to offer three lines of thought that might begin to approach a fuller explanation of the puzzling persistence of natural-property-rights talk.

Lessons From Outlaws, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Kelo's Moral Failure, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reconstructing Richard Epstein, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Michelman As Doctrinalist, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Property Metaphors And Kelo V. New London: Two Views Of The Castle, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Rehabilitating Rehab Through State Building Codes, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Building codes are not neutral documents. Traditional codes have the effect of deterring the rehabilitation of older structures. But rehabilitation - which can have many positive effects, especially on cities - should be encouraged, not deterred. One promising method of encouraging rehabilitation has been the adoption of rehabilitation codes: building codes that establish flexible but clear requirements for renovators. After analyzing traditional building codes and three different rehabilitation codes, this Note concludes that more states should adopt rehabilitation codes on a mandatory basis.

Beyond Worship: The Religious Land Use And Institutionalized Persons Act Of 2000 And Religious Institutions' Auxiliary Uses, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Religious institutions have long offered their congregants services that go beyond worship. Particularly in the last two decades, they have begun expanding far beyond their traditional offerings to a wider and more diverse array of auxiliary uses - non-worship uses that are affiliated with a religious institution. (One type of large religious institution, the megachurch, is fast gaining members by offering schools, community centers, dining facilities, even movie theaters and gymnasiums.) Government has long granted special protections to the worship uses of religious institutions. A recent federal law - the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) …