Property Law and Real Estate Commons^™

Just Undercompensation: The Idiosyncratic Premium N Eminent Domain, Brian A. Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Green Leasing - It's Not Just About Capital Expenditures, Richard J. Sobelsohn

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Panorama - Caring For The Palace Museum, Bejing, China, James Hagy, Cai Bowen

Rooftops Project

Shi Zhimin discusses his work as Director of the Ancient Building Management Office of The Palace Museum in Beijing, still also recognized by many visitors as the former Chinese imperial palace known as The Forbidden City, with Cai Bowen and Professor James Hagy, Director of The Rooftops Project.

Perspectives - Richard Cohn, Motion Picture Gaffer, Magician, Musician, James Hagy, Kristen Porro

Rooftops Project

The Rooftops Project’s Kristen Porro talks with Richard Cohn, Gaffer (Chief Electrician) to the television and movie industry on location in New York City, and performing magician, who shares tricks of his two trades that not-for-profits can use to make the most of often imperfect performance spaces.

Perspectives - Kimse Yok Mu: An Organization’S Effort For The Advancement Of Life, James Hagy, Shaan Lodi

Rooftops Project

The Rooftops Project’s Shaan Lodi talks with Turkish relief organization Kimse Yok Mu about its approach to the real estate needed to support disaster response and other work in often challenging settings in 96 countries.

Strategies For Making Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Tools 'Takings-Proof', Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

While the costs of some Sea-Level Rise (SLR) adaptation tools are undeniably daunting, the American legal system poses an additional, potentially budget-busting impediment — the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Officials at all governmental strata and from all three branches should keep the demands made by the Takings Clause, as interpreted by the judiciary, in mind as they choose tools from the diverse SLR-adaptation toolbox, as they justify their choices to the electorate and other constituencies, as they put those tools to use, and as they defend that use from litigants claiming abuse. This …

I Drink Your Milkshake?: Potential Property Rights Repercussions Of Natural Gas Exploration In New York State, Joshua M. Tallent

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Accidental Suicide Pacts And Creditor Collective Action Problems: The Mortgage Mess, The Deadweight Loss, And How To Get The Value Back, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Sustained economic recovery will remain elusive in America, post-crash, until principal is reduced on some 10-13 million underwater home mortgage loans across the nation. Yet in the case of privately securitized loans, these write-downs are all but impossible to carry out on the requisite scale because bubble-era securitization contracts, which now effectively function as suicide pacts among bondholders, would require collective action by millions of geographically dispersed passive investors in order to authorize write-downs or sales out of securitization trusts. The solution, this article suggests, is for state and municipal governments to use their eminent domain powers to buy up …

Property's Constitution, James Y. Stern

Faculty Publications

Long-standing disagreements over the definition of property as a matter of legal theory present a special problem in constitutional law. The Due Process and Takings Clauses establish individual rights that can be asserted only if “property” is at stake. Yet the leading cases interpreting constitutional property doctrines have never managed to articulate a coherent general view of property, and in some instances have reached opposite conclusions about its meaning. Most notably, government benefits provided in the form of individual legal entitlements are considered “property” for purposes of due process but not takings doctrines, a conflict the cases acknowledge but do …

Norfolk’S Flooding Adaptation Measures: Taking Lawful Precautions Or ‘Takings’ Lawsuits?, Emilie A. Whitehurst

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

No abstract provided.

Property: A Bundle Of Sticks Or A Tree?, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, property debates revolve around two conceptual models of property: the ownership model, originally developed in Europe and now revisited by information theorists and classical liberal theorists of property, and the bundle of rights model, invented in the United States by Hohfeld and the Realists. This article retrieves an alternative concept of property, the tree concept of property. The tree concept of property was developed by European property scholars between 1900 and the 1950s, as part of Europe’s own “realist” moment. It envisions property as a tree: the trunk representing the owner’s right to govern the use …

Unborn Communities, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Do property owners owe obligations to members of future generations? Although the question can be reframed in rights-terms so that it faces rights-oriented theories of property, it seems to pose a greater challenge to those theories of property that directly focus on the obligations that property owners owe to others rather than (or, better, along with) the rights of owner. The challenge is compounded where such theories emphasize the relationships between individual property owners and the various communities to which they belong. Do those communities include members of future generations? This paper addresses these questions as they apply to a …

A Specter Is Haunting The Financial Industry - The Specter Of The Global Financial Crisis: A Comment On The Imminent Expansion Of Consumer Financial Protection In The United States, The United Kingdom, And The European Union, Daniel Lamb

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

This Comment explores the regulatory fallout from the global financial crisis. Across borders, policy makers are united in their conviction to reconcile the perceived failures of their predecessors to foresee and prevent the crisis, the effects of which show no signs of abating. A critical component of what caused the crisis was the inability to correct failures in the consumer credit market, specifically in subprime mortgages. Exacerbated by an influx of capital and a generally weak regulatory environment, this market failure manifested itself forcefully through a tidal wave of defaults in the American mortgage market that sent shock waves around …

Nevada's Residential Real Estate Crisis: Local Governments And The Use Of Eminent Domain To Condemn Mortgage Notes, Ngai Pindell

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Foreground Principles, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court has declared for decades that, for Takings Clause purposes, property interests are not created by the Constitution but rather are determined by “existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law.” However, the Court has exhibited a strong normative preference for a certain type of independent source — “background principles” of the common law — over others, namely state statutory and administrative law. This Article calls this preference into question.

The Article develops a model to demonstrate the four basic categories, or quadrants, of takings decisions that extensive reliance on the …

Property's Ends: The Publicness Of Private Law Values, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Property theorists commonly suppose that property has as its ends certain private values, such as individual autonomy and personal security. This Article contends that property’s real end is human flourishing, that is, living a life that is as fulfilling as possible. Human flourishing, although property’s ultimate end, is neither monistic or simple. Rather, it is inclusive and comprises multiple values. Those values, the content of human flourishing, derives, at least in part, from an understanding of the sorts of beings we are ― social and political. A consequence of this conception of the human condition is that the values of …

Playing God: The Legality Of Plans Denying Scarce Resources To People With Disabilities In Public Health Emergencies, Wendy F. Hensel, Leslie E. Wolf

Florida Law Review

Public health emergencies can arise in a number of different ways. They can follow a natural disaster, such as Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami, and the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. They may be man-made, such as the September 11 attacks and the anthrax scare. They may also be infectious. While no pandemic flu has yet reached the severity of the 1918 flu, there have been several scares, including avian flu and most recently H1N1.

Few questions are more ethically or legally loaded than determining who will receive scarce medical resources in the event of a widespread public health …

Agins V. City Of Tiburon: An Aggrieved Party-Loss Of Inverse Condemnation Actions In Zoning Ordinance Disputes , Walter R. Luostari

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Real Estate Brokerage Industry And Antitrust Implications, Lynn H. Mack, Valerie A. Moore

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Agins V. City Of Tiburon: Open Space Zoning Prevails - Failure To Submit Master Plan Prevents A Cognizable Decrease In Property Value, Jermaine Chastain

Pepperdine Law Review

This casenote examines the Supreme Court's struggle to reconcile its focus on the facial validity of a zoning ordinance with the traditional "taking" approach requiring diligent factual inquiry. While the Agins Court reiterates such an approach, the author notes the Court's departure from important constitutional and precedential considerations. The author offers a possible explanation for the departure, concluding that the Agins decision apparently makes plan submission a prerequisite for acknowledging economic loss and strongly implies a requirement of complete loss of all property value before a compensable taking will be recognized.