Real Estate & Property Law

Van Erp on European Property Law

Posted on May 07, 2009
Sjef J. H. M. Van Erp (University of Maastricht) has posted From 'Classical' to Modern European Property Law? on SSRN. Here's the abstract: In this paper I will examine some fundamental aspects of European property law. Do European property law...

Davidson to HUD

Posted on May 05, 2009
Nestor Davidson (Colorado), an occasional guest here and an all-around awesome guy, has accepted a senior legal position at the U.S. Dep't of Housing and Urban Development. Here's Colorado's press release: Associate Professor Nestor Davidson has accepted an appointment as...

Restricting Use of Property From Beyond the Grave

Posted on May 05, 2009
The NY Times has an interesting article on the problem of how to deal with restricted gifts to charities as times change. The story in Trinity?s case is a common one for these rifts. An economics professor (whom I don?t...

RIP 2008-2009

Posted on May 03, 2009
Another school-year bites the dust. All in all, this was a good semester here in Lexington ? we found a new dean, an (expensive) new basketball coach, and I finally got this paper out into the world. Yet, looking back,...

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Picture Pages

Posted on May 03, 2009
Following up on an earlier post, here are a few more pictures of famous property cases: William Fischel at Dartmouth has a series of photographic essays on the Lucas case in South Carolina. See here and here. And, in an...

Shrinky Dinks

Posted on May 01, 2009
There was a really short but gripping article in the New York Times about how to manage declining cities. From the intro: Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow [Flint, Michigan?s] endless decline. Now another idea...

WSJ on Blight and Eminent Domain

Posted on April 30, 2009
Today's W$J has an article on blight and post-Kelo eminent domain, featuring a scintillating and profound quote from yours truly. Okay, maybe neither scintillating or profound. But I'm quoted, which should make my Dean happy, and that's all that matters,...

On the Subject of Post-Kelo Eminent Domain Reform . . .

Posted on April 30, 2009
The new issue of the Review of Law and Economics has an article titled Pass a Law, Any Law, Fast! State Legislative Responses to the Kelo Backlash, by Edward J. Lopez (San Jose State), R. Todd Jewell (U. North Texas)...

Phoenix Housing Prices Fall By 50% in Less Than Three Years

Posted on April 29, 2009
From the NY Times: Phoenix has achieved the unwelcome distinction of becoming the first major American city where home prices have fallen in half since the market peaked in the middle of the decade, according to data released Tuesday. Ouch....

More Entry Level Hires

Posted on April 29, 2009
Legal Theory Blog has updated its 2009 Entry Level Hiring Report. Here are a few more hires with interests in Property stuff: Richard B Graves (Northern Kentucky) Irina Manta (Case Western Reserve) Talha M. Syed (Berkeley) Anastasia Telesetsky (Idaho) Steve...

Mossoff on Patent Thickets at the VC

Posted on April 29, 2009
Adam Mossoff is blogging this week at the VC on his article on The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket. Very interesting stuff. Ben Barros [Comments are held for approval, so there will be some delay in...

Renting the Land of Milk & Honey?

Posted on April 27, 2009
David Plotz read every word of the Old Testament and blogged about the experience on Slate. One of Plotz's take home points is that in "the Bible there's more about real estate than there is about the Lord." As he...

The Way of the Dodo

Posted on April 27, 2009
America's Most Endangered Places. Pic: Lanai City - Lanai, Hawaii. In 1922, James Dole, the president of Dole Food Company bought the entire island of Lanai and turned it into the world's largest pineapple plantation. Laborers from the Philippines, Korea,...

A Coney Island of The Mind

Posted on April 27, 2009
The New York Daily News recounts the historic zoning battle that's shaping up over Coney Island: Coney Island is facing the most important neighborhood rezoning in the history of New York City. What happens here affects the economic future of...

Killing Trees

Posted on April 23, 2009
Students have many reasons to loathe law school textbooks; the back-breaking size, the low-quality paper, the unanswered questions in the notes between cases (Do you see why?). The biggest gripe among my students, however, is the price of their materials...

Krier on Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights

Posted on April 22, 2009
James E. Krier (Michigan) has posted Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights on SSRN. Here's the abstract: Legal scholars have never settled on a satisfactory account of the evolution of property rights. The touchstone for virtually all discussion,...

A Gift to be Simple, A Gift to be Free

Posted on April 21, 2009
For anyone with an interest in Utopian communities, the New York Times Magazine ran a long article on the Transition Initiative: The Transition movement ... shares certain principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper ? and more radical ?...

Blogging the Bluegrass

Posted on April 20, 2009
Lexington, Kentucky is a wonderful place to live and work. Founded in 1779, Lexington is the self-proclaimed "Horse Capital of the World," Kentucky's second largest city, and home to (arguably) the oldest law school in the country. Kentucky is also...

Bedbugs and the Implied Warranty of Habitability

Posted on April 17, 2009
I was recently asked whether a bedbug infestation might support an implied warranty of habitability claim. I thought that it probably would. A quick Google search quickly turned up a story about a New York court decision holding that a...

Treehouses: A Growing Menace

Posted on April 17, 2009
Advocates of strong zoning controls should consider themselves on notice; The treehouse construction industry is slowly undermining the land use system. Recently, there has been a wonderful string of news articles about confrontations between neighbors over the zoning of (really...

Prefab Housing for the Homeless

Posted on April 16, 2009
Vancouver recently announced plans to construct 190 prefabricated, modular housing units on city-owned land adjacent to the Drake Hotel in the Downtown area. It seems the units will be operated by the City of Vancouver, and used as semi-permanent housing...

Lehavi on Taxing and Taking

Posted on April 15, 2009
Amnon Lehavi (Interdisciplinary Center Herzliyah - Radzyner School of Law) has posted The Strand Not Taken: The Taxing/Taking Taxonomy in American Property Law on SSRN. Here's the abstract: Takings jurisprudence is struggling with a constant paradox. It is conventionally portrayed...

From bollards to bulb-outs

Posted on April 14, 2009
GOOD Magazine has a interactive graphic explaining what makes a street pedestrian-friendly. Steve Clowney

Should We Care About Detroit?

Posted on April 13, 2009
Detroit is sick: Unemployment has swept through the town like a grass fire. The automobile industry continues to spiral toward collapse. Buildings lay abandoned. Housing prices have crumpled - the median price of a home sold in Detroit in December...

Painting the Foreclosure Mess

Posted on April 11, 2009
Designboom says: amy casey is a painter based in cleveland, ohio. casey has a fascination with the urban landscape and its evolution and transformation. in her paintings, casey depicts scenes of buildings, homes and city infrastructure being upended. she explains...

A Room With a View

Posted on April 10, 2009
From Forbes Traveler, pictures of the world's best skylines.... Steve Clowney

Squatting in Foreclosed Homes

Posted on April 10, 2009
From today's NY Times: Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend?s couch into a newly empty house...

Using Eminent Domain to Take the Preakness?

Posted on April 10, 2009
Ilya Somin at the VC has some details. A taste: Maryland state legislators are considering legislation that would enable them to use eminent domain to condemn the Preakness Stakes horse-racing track, as well as the trademark and other intellectual property...

A Plug for Urban Legal History

Posted on April 10, 2009
This semester I taught a seminar on the history of the physical development of Lexington, Kentucky, the town where my law school is nestled. I stole the idea whole cloth from Bob Ellickson, who has offered a similar course at...

Rose on Servitudes

Posted on April 10, 2009
Carol M. Rose (Arizona) has posted Servitudes on SSRN. Here's the abstract: Traditional servitudes running with the land bristled with complex legal limitations, but those limitations served three comprehensible overlapping goals: assuring that potential future landowners would learn about servitude...

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