Property Law and Real Estate Commons^™

Standardization And Pluralism In Property Law , Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

At the heart of contemporary property theory stands an intriguing puzzle. Unlike the relatively unconstrained freedom that contract law provides for private ordering, property law recognizes only a limited and standard list of mandatory forms. This standardization-known as the numerus clausus from the civil law concept that the "number is closed" -poses a basic conundrum: what can explain a persistent feature of the law that seems, at first glance, so clearly to restrict the autonomy and efficiency gains conventionally associated with private property? This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I describes the numerus clausus principle and the problems that …

Property And Relative Status , Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

Property does many things-it incentivizes productive activity, facilitates exchange, forms an integral part of individual identity, and shapes communities. But property does something equally fundamental: it communicates. And perhaps the most ubiquitous and important messages that property communicates have to do with relative status, with the material world defining and reinforcing a variety of economic, social, and cultural hierarchies. This status-signaling function of property-with property serving as an important locus for symbolic meaning through which people compare themselves to others-complicates premises underlying central discourses in contemporary property theory. In particular, status signaling can skew property's incentive and allocative benefits, leading …

Demystifying The Right To Exclude: Of Property, Inviolability, And Automatic Injunctions, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

The right to exclude has long been considered a central component of property. In focusing on the element of exclusion, courts and scholars have paid little attention to what an owner's right to exclude means and the forms in which this right might manifest itself in actual property practice. For some time now, the right to exclude has come to be understood as nothing but an entitlement to injunctive relief – that whenever an owner successfully establishes title and an interference with the same, an injunction will automatically follow. Such a view attributes to the right a distinctively consequentialist meaning, …

Negotiating The Mega-Rebuilding Deal At The World Trade: Adjacent Property Owners, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

I will be very brief because I am a peripheral participant in this meeting. The company with which I am connected, Brookfield, owns property near the site. We were the third highest bidder to take over the World Trade Center in a deal that was completed in 2001. If our bid had been slightly higher and we had won the contract, then my experience would have been different. However, as it stands, I am peripheral participant. My primary connection is with Alex Garvin, my college classmate and friend for almost fifty years, and Meredith Kane, one of my favorite students. …

Land Assembly Districts, Michael A. Heller, Rick Hills

Faculty Scholarship

Eminent domain for economic development is both attractive and appalling. States need the power to condemn because so much land in America is inefficiently fragmented. But public land assembly provokes hostility because vulnerable communities get bulldozed. Courts offer no help. The academic literature is a muddle. Is it possible to assemble land without harming the poor and powerless? Yes. This Article proposes the creation of Land Assembly Districts, or "LADs." This new property form solves the age-old tensions in eminent domain and shows, more generally, how careful redesign of property rights can enhance both welfare and fairness. The economic and …

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family …

In Defense Of Property , Kristen A. Carpenter, Sonia K. Katyal, Angela R. Riley

Faculty Scholarship

This Article responds to an emerging view, in scholarship and popular society, that it is normatively undesirable to employ property law as a means of protecting indigenous cultural heritage. Recent critiques suggest that propertizing culture impedes the free flow of ideas, speech, and perhaps culture itself. In our view, these critiques arise largely because commentators associate "property" with a narrow model of individual ownership that reflects neither the substance of indigenous cultural property claims nor major theoretical developments in the broader field of property law. Thus, departing from the individual rights paradigm, our Article situates indigenous cultural property claims, particularly …

Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Immunity: An Application To Cyberspace, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This Article sets out a theory of torts and cyberspace wrongs. My goal is to provide a sparse theoretical account of tort law and apply it to cyberspace torts, both negligent and intentional. I approach this goal by applying the framework of property rules and liability rules to cyberspace torts. That framework suggests that trespass doctrine is appropriate in instances of cyber invasions of private information resources, such as the breaking of codes to access private information on the web. However, trespass doctrine should play no role in cyber-invasions of public information resources, such as the sending of spam email. …

The Disputed Quality Of Software Patents, John R. Allison, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze the characteristics of the patents held by firms in the software industry. Unlike prior researchers, we rely on the examination of individual patents to determine which patents involve software inventions. This method of identifying the relevant patents is more laborious than the methods that previous scholars have used, but it produces a data set from which we can learn more about the role of patents in the software industry. In general, we find that patents the computer technology firms obtain on software inventions have more prior art references, claims, and forward citations than the patents that the same …

Property And Empire: The Law Of Imperialism In Johnson V. M'Intosh, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), has long been a puzzle, both in its doctrinal structure and in long, strange dicta which are both triumphal and elegiac. In this Essay, I show that the opinion becomes newly intelligible when read in the context of the law and theory of colonialism, concerned, like the case itself, with the expropriation of continents and relations between dominant and subject peoples.

I examine several instances where the seeming incoherence of the opinion instead shows its debt to imperial jurisprudence, which rested on a distinction between …

Property Outlaws, Eduardo Moises Peñalver, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

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 "wrongdoer" comports with the status of property rights within our characteristically individualist, capitalist, political culture. This reflexively dim view of property lawbreakers is also shared, to a large degree, by property theorists, many of whom regard property rights as a relatively fixed constellation of entitlements that collectively produce stability and efficiency through an orderly system of ownership. In this Article, Professors Peihalver and Katyal seek partially to rehabilitate the reviled character of the intentional property …

People As Resources: Recruitment And Reciprocity In The Freedom-Promoting Approach To Property, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Theorists usually explain and evaluate property regimes either through the lens of economics or by conceptions of personhood. This Article argues that the two approaches are intertwined in a way that is usually overlooked. Property law both facilitates the efficient use and allocation of scarce resources and recognizes and protects aspects of personhood. It must do both, because human beings are both resources for one another and the persons whose moral importance the legal system seeks to protect. This Article explores how property law has addressed this paradox in the past and how it might in the future.

Two bodies …

If You Prompt Them, They Will Rule: The Warranty Of Habitability Meets New Court Information Systems, Mary Zulack

Faculty Scholarship

A recent conference on housing rights invited participants to think about the impacts, actual and potential, of the judge-made doctrine of the implied warranty of habitability in residential tenancies. This essay focuses on the warranty, and suggests establishing technology systems for judges to help them give new
life to the doctrine and thereby to accelerate actual repair of rental housing through court mandates.

The conference attendees seemed to agree that when trial judges are presented with claimed breaches of the warranty of habitability, they have not, on the whole, used the doctrine to order that repairs actually be effectuated. They …

The Morality Of Property, Thomas W. Merrill, Henry E. Smith

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between property and morality has been obscured by three elements in our intellectual tradition. First is the assumption, which can be traced to Bentham, that property is a pure creature of law. An institution assumed to be wholly dependent on law for its existence is unlikely to be infused with strong moral content. Second is the related tradition, also Benthamite, of examining questions about property law from a utilitarian perspective. Utilitarianism is, of course, a moral theory. But in its modern applications, based on price theory and cost-benefit analysis, it adopts a framework largely indifferent to questions of …

Subprime Standardization: How Rating Agencies Allow Predatory Lending To Flourish In The Secondary Mortgage Market, David Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Locational Justice: Race, Class, And The Grassroots Protest Of Property Takings, Judith E. Koons

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The American Transformation Of Waste Doctrine: A Pluralist Interpretation, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Just And The Wild, Laura S. Underkuffler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Private Business As Public Good: Hotel Development And Kelo, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 2004, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. announced plans to demolish the all-but-derelict New Haven Coliseum and replace it with a publicly financed redevelopment that would include a 300-room hotel. Critics of the plan immediately objected that the hotel-even if it were completed-was a poor public investment, that there was no demand for such a hotel, and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Some critics pointed to New Haven's own checkered history of major development projects, especially the failed downtown mall and the famously catastrophic Oak Street redevelopment. As of February 2006, the city …

Six Myths About Kelo: Kelo V. City Of New London, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Kelo v. City of New London, 125 S. Ct. 2655 (2005), is unique in the modem annals of law in terms of the negative response it has evoked. The initial reaction by lawyers familiar with the case was one of lack of surprise. Within days, however, Internet bloggers, television commentators, and neighbors talking over backyard fences decided that Keio was an outrage. Even Justice Stevens sought to distance himself from his own majority opinion, declaring in a speech to a bar association that he thought the outcome was "unwise," and that he would not have supported it if he were …

Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together: Experimental Evidence Of Anticommons Tragedies, Ben Depoorter, Sven Vanneste

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Common Law Property Metaphors On The Internet: The Real Problem With The Doctrine Of Cybertrespass, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of cybertrespass represents one of the most recent attempts by courts to apply concepts and principles from the real world to the virtual world of the Internet. A creation of state common law, the doctrine essentially involved extending the tort of trespass to chattels to the electronic world. Consequently, unauthorized electronic interferences are deemed trespassory intrusions and rendered actionable. The present paper aims to undertake a conceptual study of the evolution of the doctrine, examining the doctrinal modifications courts were required to make to mould the doctrine to meet the specificities of cyberspace. It then uses cybertrespass to …

The American Transformation Of Waste Doctrine: A Pluralist Interpretation, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

This Article draws on an episode of nineteenth-century American doctrinal history to develop a pluralist approach to explaining changes in property law. It addresses the question: What causes ac­count for the development of property regimes across time? The courts' answer emerges from examination of nineteenth-century American reform of the law of waste, which governs the changes te­nants may make in the estates they occupy. A line of state supreme court cases, beginning in 1810, transformed the doctrine from the strict rule of English common law to a flexible standard. Economic analysis helps to explain the change; the full story, however, …

The Rose Theorem?, Michael Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Law resists theorems. We have hypotheses, typologies, heuristics, and conundrums. But, until now, only one plausible theorem – and that we borrowed from economics. Could there be a second, the Rose Theorem?

Any theorem must generalize, be falsifiable, and have predictive power. Law's theorems, however, seem to require three additional qualities: they emerge from tales of ordinary stuff; are named for, not by, their creators; and have no single authoritative form. For example, Ronald Coase wrote of ranchers and farmers. He has always shied away from the Theorem project. When later scholars formalized his parable, they created multiple and inconsistent …

Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it …

The Rhetorics Of Taking Cases: It's Mine V. Let's Share, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

Regulatory takings cases originated in 1922 when Justice Holmes, in Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, ruled that "while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if a regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking." This simple rule has resulted in over eighty years of case law that Carol Rose states has left takings law to "muddle along." While many legal scholars decry the incoherence and inconsistency of takings case law, this article provides a rhetorical analysis that explains the "muddle" as a result of rhetorical tensions between a Sophistic approach ("Let's Share") and an Aristotelian …

Common Interest Developments At The Crossroads Of Legal Theory, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

What makes common interest developments (CIDs) interesting for legal theory? In my view, CIDs should provoke our interest because they operate at the intersection of two axes of contemporary legal scholarship. The first axis concerns rights allocation, what I have called the spectrum from commons to anticommons property. The second axis concerns governance institutions, which can occupy the space between private and public. These two dimensions define the theoretical field within which we create new forms of group property, and through which we solve emerging collective action dilemmas. CIDs are located at this crossroads, delicately poised between extremes on both …

Property, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that despite its seeming disintegration, property is more vibrant than ever — it is a field that has focused on understanding the formal and informal institutions by which society channels decision-making for scarce resources. Many exciting recent innovations in property theory have arisen through dialogue between US and Commonwealth scholars and legislatures. The article is organized as follows. The first part explains the focus on analytic property theory, which is posed in distinction to a jurisprudential approach. The second part introduces the familiar division of ownership into a trilogy of ideal types: private, commons, and state. The …

Policing L.A.'S Skid Row: Crime And Real Estate Redevelopment In Downtown Los Angeles [An Experiment In Real Time], Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I document the present. I make a record, with photographs, interviews, maps, and observations of L.A.'s Skid Row as it is today. Drawing on the tradition and methods of critical socio-legal studies, I also explore the constitutive dimensions of deviance. I investigate the possible attraction that disorderliness and criminality may have to today's urban pioneers. I explore the idea that deviance and disorder may become, in some corners, a consumable good to urban dwellers. And I do this by drawing on numerous hours of personal observation on the streets of L.A.'s Skid Row, on interviews of service …

A Freedom-Promoting Approach To Property: A Renewed Tradition For New Debates, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

This should be a heady time for theorists and practitioners of property law. Some of the most important recent proposals to improve human wellbeing rest on the expansion or reform of property rights. From Peru, the political economist Hernando de Soto recently captured the world's attention by contending that a lack of property rights stands between the slum dwellers of the world's poor countries and new horizons of prosperity. Nearer home, Yale economist Robert Shiller has proposed a new market in risk, essentially propertizing present expectations of good fortune, which would represent one of the most dramatic expansions in the …