PropertyProf Blog

What Super-density Looks Like

Amazing photos from Hong Kong.

Steve Clowney

Sprankling on the Global Right to Property

John Sprankling (McGeorge) has posted The Global Right to Property (Columbia J. of Transnational Law) on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Does a right to property exist under international law? The traditional answer to this question is “no” ― a right to property can arise only under national law. But sweeping economic and political changes in recent decades have laid the foundation for recognizing a global right to property. Ideological opposition to property rights has faded with the end of the Cold War; China, Russia, and other socialist states have transitioned to market economies which are premised on private property; and the globalization of trade has enhanced international support for protecting property rights. Accordingly, it is appropriate to revisit the question.

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that a right to property can arise only under national law. It is the first legal scholarship to demonstrate that a right to property exists under international law, not merely as a moral precept but rather as an entitlement which all nations must honor. The existence of the global right to property is supported by three independent lines of analysis: conventional law; general principles of law; and customary international law.

Recognition of the global right to property has practical implications for the international legal system. It will ensure that the right is respected in proceedings before international judicial and arbitral tribunals. Over time, it will also contribute to building the legal framework for regulating property in the global commons, areas which are outside of the sovereign jurisdiction of any nation such as the high seas, outer space, and Antarctica.

Steve Clowney

Map of the Day: States Where You Can be Denied Housing Because of Your Marital Status

National Fair Housing Alliance has released a report today on "Modernizing the Fair Housing Act for the 21st Century."  The report highlights all the ways that landlords remain free to discriminate.  From the summary at the Atlantic Cities Blog:

Federal laws don't protect against housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, income source or marital status (whether or not you're married is a different question from if you have kids). Many states do this on their own. But a surprising number don't. Today, it's still possible for a landlord in Texas to refuse to rent you an apartment with your live-in girlfriend (married couples only!), for a property management company in Alabama to turn you away because you're gay or transgendered, or for a homeowner in Indiana to decline your application because your income (which is enough to cover your rent) comes from housing vouchers, child support or alimony.

Steve Clowney

Property Tax By State

TaxFoundation.org recorded property taxes throughout the United States for a three-year period ending in 2009, allowing taxpayers to examine average property taxes by county. Tax-Rates.org then took the information and calculated averages by state. Here's a list of the state average property tax, based on percentage of home value:

Alabama — 0.33 percent

Alaska — 1.04 percent

Arizona — 0.72 percent

Arkansas — 0.52 percent

California — 0.74 percent

Colorado — 0.6 percent

(More below the Jump)

Continue reading "Property Tax By State"

Alexander on the Moral Obligations Property Owners Owe to Future Generations

Greg Alexander (Cornell) has posted Unborn Communities on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

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 property theory that I have developed in recent work, a theory that we can call the human-flourishing theory of property.

The conclusion drawn here is that property owners do indeed owe moral obligations to future generations. But the scope of those obligations is restricted, certainly more so than some theorists, such as Jeremy Waldron, have claimed. Unlike Waldron, for whom such obligations are a matter of rights, I argue that the obligations that property owners owe to past generations are grounded on dependence. Specifically, I argue that if we expect fellow members of our communities in future generations to continue what I call the life-transcending projects that we began, then it is incumbent on us to provide that same background conditions that we enjoyed to those future generation community members to whom we transfer the responsibility of continuing or fulfilling our life-transcending projects. Moreover, as the distance between the living and the unborn increases, our obligations to future generational communities generally weaken. Our obligations to them are limited to the background conditions that enable them to continue the life-transcending projects transferred to them. These conclusions place me in an intermediate position between those who take a robust view of the obligations that the living owe to future generations and those who think that the living owe no such obligations at all.

Steve Clowney

Kansas Outlaws Sustainability (Or At Least Thinks About It)

Over at Land Use Prof, Jessie Owley highlights Kansas' attempt to rid the state of the scourge of sustainable development:

Politicians in Kansas . . . seem to have been contemplating the power of law to dictate sustainability rules. House Bill No. 2366 currently before the Kansas state legislature would make it illegal to use “public funds to promote or implement sustainable development." Frankly with the trouble surrounding just trying to define what should be considered "sustainable development," I am not sure how meaningful such a law would be -- put gotta appluad tease Kansas for trying. As a professor at a public school, I find the provision restricting the teaching of sustainability to be especially worrisome [no public funding can be used for "materials prepared or presented as part of a class, course, curriculum or instructional material"].

Next thing you know, states will be outlawing climate change.

Steve Clowney

Davidson on New Formalism in the Aftermath of the Housing Crisis

Nestor Davidson (Fordham) has posted New Formalism in the Aftermath of the Housing Crisis (Boston University Law Review) on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

The housing crisis has left in its wake an ongoing legal crisis. After housing markets began to collapse across the country in 2007, foreclosures and housing-related bankruptcies surged significantly and have barely begun to abate more than six years later. As the legal system has confronted this aftermath, courts have increasingly accepted claims by borrowers that lenders and other entities involved in securitizing mortgages failed to follow requirements related to perfecting and transferring their security interests. These cases – which focus variously on issues such as standing, real party in interest, chains of assignment, the negotiability of mortgage notes, and the like – signal renewed formality in nearly every aspect of the resolution of mortgage distress. This new formalism in the aftermath of the housing crisis represents something of an ironic turn in the jurisprudence. From the earliest history of the mortgage, lenders have had a tendency to invoke the clear, sharp edges of law, while borrowers in distress have often resorted to equity for forbearance. The post-crisis caselaw thus upends the historical valence of lender-side formalism and borrower-side flexibility.

Building on this insight, this Article makes a normative and a theoretical claim. Normatively, while scholars have largely embraced the new formalism for the accountability it augurs, this consensus ignores the trend’s potential negative consequences. Lenders have greater resources than consumers to manage the technical aspects of mortgage distress litigation over the long run, and focusing on formal requirements may distract from responding to deeper substantive and structural questions that still remain largely unaddressed more than a half decade into the crisis. Equally telling, from a theoretical perspective, the new formalism sheds light on the perennial tension between law’s supposed certainty and equity’s flexibility. The emerging jurisprudence underscores the contingency of property and thus reinforces – again, ironically – pluralist conceptions of property even in the crucible of hard-edged formalism.

Steve Clowney

Places of Perpetual Fire

Slate profiles the "Door to Hell" in Derweze, Turkmenistan:

In 1971 a Soviet drilling rig rumbled across the hot, expansive Karakum desert of Turkmenistan in search of natural gas. They found a large gas pocket near the 350-person village of Derweze, but as the team drilled into the earth, the rig punctured the cavern and collapsed into it, creating a 328-foot crater leaking deadly natural gas. The Soviets abandoned their rig and lit the hole on fire. It has been burning for 40 years.

The article also lists these other places of neverending fire:

• Centralia, the Pennsylvania town sitting atop a massive coal fire
• Burning Mountain, the 6,000-year-old coal fire that moves one meter per year
• Yanar Dag, the "fire mountain" of Azerbaijan

Steve Clowney

Davidson on Navigating HUD Programs

Nestor Davidson (Fordham) has posted A Most Useful Ball of Thread (Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development) on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

This book review of Navigating HUD Programs: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Labyrinth (George Weidenfeller & Julie McGovern eds., 2012) discusses the approach the book takes to a range of HUD programs, discusses some intimations of reform efforts suggested by the authors, and explores ways in which the book’s guidance reflects potential benefits in nascent HUD efforts at programmatic consolidation and modernization.

Steve Clowney

Can the Dead Own Property?

Over at Concurring Opinions, Meredith Render meditates on death and meaning of ownership:

Herein enters the perennial problem of death. When an owner is a natural person (rather than, for example, a corporation), then death would seem to present an obstacle to owning. When an owner dies, her capacity to make decisions about the use of an entity is terminated. Unlike in the newborn example, that capacity is not dormant, it is extinguished forever. If the capacity to exercise control over an entity is a necessary criterion of ownership, we would not expect deceased people to be capable of ownership. This intuition is supported by the fact that generally when an owner dies, the object of ownership passes (by will or intestate succession) to another owner. In this instance, there is no continuity of “ownership” – the new owner does not act on the behalf of the deceased owner – the ownership simply ends with the owner.

A notable exception to this scenario exists in the context of trusts. A trust presents challenge to our conventional understanding of “ownership,” – and particularly to the idea of ownership as a capacity. This is so not only because “ownership” is split in the context of a trust between equitable and legal owners, but also because some degree of control over the trust assets seems to be retained by the settlor. In this sense, the settlor seems to continue to act as a kind of “owner” of the assets, even though the settlor may be deceased. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “dead hand control.” Lately I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon in the context of the commitments implicit in our concept of “owner.” The interplay of these ideas is especially interesting in the context of what is sometimes described as a “dynasty trust.” A dynasty trust has the potential to endure into perpetuity, long after the settlor is deceased. I’ll be posting more on dynasty trusts, death and the concept of “owner” in the weeks to come.

Steve Clowney

Mossoff on Copyright and Scholarly Publishing

Adam Mossoff (George Mason) has posted How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Today, copyright policy is framed solely in terms of a trade off between the benefits of incentivizing authors to create new works and the losses from restricting access to those works. This is a mistake that has distorted the policy and legal debates concerning the fundamental role of copyright within scholarly publishing, as the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom asserts that copyright is unnecessary for researchers who are motivated for non-pecuniary reasons. As a result, commentators and legal decision-makers dismiss the substantial investments and productive labors of scholarly publishers as irrelevant to copyright policy. Furthermore, widespread misinformation about the allegedly “zero cost” of digital publication exacerbates this policy distortion.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by providing the more complete policy, legal and economic context for evaluating scholarly publishing. It details for the first time the $100s millions in ex ante investments in infrastructure, skilled labor, and other resources required to create, publish, distribute and maintain scholarly articles on the Internet and in other digital platforms. Based on interviews with representatives from scholarly publishers, it reveals publishers’ extensive and innovative development of digital distribution mechanisms since the advent of the World Wide Web in 1993. Even more important, this paper explains how these investments in private-ordering mechanisms reflect fundamental copyright policy, as copyright secures to both authors and publishers the fruits of their productive labors. In sum, copyright spurs both authors to invest in new works and publishers to invest in innovative, private-ordering mechanisms. Both of these fundamental copyright policies are as important today in our fast-changing digital world as they were in yesteryear’s world in which publishers distributed scholarly articles in dead-tree format.

Steve Clowney

Are Pocket Neighborhoods The Next Big Thing?

A pocket neighborhood is a grouping of smaller residences, often built around a common courtyard, designed to promote a heightened sense of community and neighborliness.  In the last few months, they've gotten good press on the Huffington Post, the Atlantic Citites Blog, and Yahoo.  From the Yahoo story:

Who likes pocket neighborhoods? [Architect Ross Chapin] argues that we’re all drawn, as social creatures, to community. But in the 15 years since he first developed pocket neighborhoods he’s found a few groups who really identify with the idea.

“One is the baby boomers, as they move toward retirement,” Chapin said. “We’re seeing huge numbers of people who are trying to imagine their dream home for the next part of their life. A house that’s big enough but not too big, simpler and where the key notes are quality and community.” Other groups include active single women as well as echo-boomers — the 20- and 30-somethings trying to define their idea of the dream home.

Steve Clowney

The Second Most Stolen Food Item?

Nutella?

Police said Monday an unknown number of culprits made off with 5 metric tons (5.5 tons) of Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread from a parked trailer in the central German town of Bad Hersfeld over the weekend.

If the authorities are smart, they'll start by interviewing Columbia students studying abroad in Germany this semester. Additionally, everyone in Germany should be keep their eyes peeled for anyone trying to steal an entire freight train worth of bananas.

Steve Clowney

Rose on Racially Restrictive Covenants

Carol Rose (Arizona/Yale) has posted Property Law and the Rise, Life, and Demise of Racially Restrictive Covenants (Book Chapter) on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

This article was given as the 6th Annual Wolf Family Lecture on the American Law of Real Property, University of Florida Levin College of Law (2013). It draws on property law discussions in Richard R.W. Brooks and Carol M. Rose, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (Harvard Univ. Press 2013). The article outlines the ways in which constitutional law and property law engaged in a dialog about white-only racial covenants from their early twentieth-century origins to the middle of the twentieth century and beyond. After a shaky beginning, both constitutional law and property law became relatively permissive about racial covenants by the 1920s. But proponents of racial covenants had to work around property law doctrines — including seemingly arcane doctrines like the Rule Against Perpetuities, disfavor to restraints on alienation, "horizontal privity," and "touch and concern." Moreover, property law weaknesses gave leverage to civil rights opponents of covenants, long before Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the major constitutional case that made these covenants unenforceable in courts. Even after Shelley's constitutional decision, property law continued to be a contested area for racial covenants, with echoes even today.

The First Co-op

The New York Times takes a look at the history of the Rembrandt, the first co-op building in the US:

Although an 1882 pamphlet issued by the developers renounced “any socialistic union, even of the most plausible and conservative character,” there was talk of buying coal and ice in bulk and retaining a common staff for cooking and laundry.

The developers said that they were looking for “people of means and good social standing”; the advent of the resident-owned building, and hence the co-op board, allowed control over one’s neighbors, which was something no other apartment house could provide.

Steve Clowney

Map of the Day: Most & Least Religious Metro Areas

From the Atlantic:

Steve Clowney

Baron on the Bundle of Rights Metaphor

Jane Baron (Temple) has posted Rescuing the Bundle of Rights Metaphor in Property Law (Cincinnati Law Review) on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

For much of the twentieth century, legal academics conceptualized property as a bundle of rights. But property theory today is deeply divided between theorists who focus on property’s ends, i.e., its reflection of values such as democracy or human flourishing, and those who focus on property’s means, i.e., its use of qualities such as modularity and exclusion to manage complexity in a cost-effective way. The bundle-of-rights conceptualization has been swept up into the controversy, becoming the particular target of means-focused theorists, who argue that the bundle conceptualization obscures critical features of the property system, most notably its use of strategies of exclusion, in rem rights, and indirectness. These theorists assert that, twentieth century wisdom notwithstanding, property is not a bundle of rights but rather is a law of things.

Contrary to these theorists, this Article argues that the bundle-of-rights conceptualization remains useful both descriptively and normatively. First, the bundle conceptualization produces more precise specification of the legal relations of parties in both simple and complex property arrangements. Second, it clarifies the normative choices that underlie decisions about property. Third, it focuses attention on the quality of the relationships that property constructs. Finally, bundle-of-rights analysis generally forces information forward. Because the information produced by the granular analysis of property bundles is useful, the bundle of rights metaphor should not be displaced or abandoned. Indeed, the complexity of contemporary property issues — and in particular their growing connection to the alternative legal fields of privacy and intellectual property — makes the bundle conceptualization all the more fruitful.

Steve Clowney

What's the Most Oft-Stolen Food Item?

Cheese:

A new report from the Center for Retail Research claims that cheese is the world's most frequently stolen food, and as such, it has been labeled a "high risk food." [...] Almost four percent of the world's cheese supply ends up stolen, putting cheese ahead of other frequent grocery targets like candy and alcohol. Shoplifting rates as a whole are going up, because, hey, times are tough."

Steve Clowney

Rose on the Psychological State of Non-Owners in Property Law

Carol Rose (Arizona/Yale) has posted Psychologies of Property (and Why Property is Not a Hawk-Dove Game) (Book Chapter) on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

This paper discusses the psychological states associated with various theories of property. Many theories view property from the psychological perspective of the owner, describing how property enables an owner to create or present a self to the world, to enjoy a zone of liberty, to acquire the confidence to participate in politics or economic activities, among other matters. This paper, however, takes particular interest in the psychological states associated with the non-owner — the person who confronts the property of others. Some theorists have described property as a “hawk/dove” or “chicken” game, in which the non-owner takes a dove role, implicitly from fear. This paper argues, however, that the non-owner’s respect for property cannot be explained adequately by fear. Respect for the property of others emerges as a somewhat mysterious psychological state from the point of view of rational actors, but it is nevertheless critical for supporting the institution of property.

Steve Clowney

Stern on Social Capital & Residential Property

Stephanie Stern (Chicago-Kent) has posted The Dark Side of Town: The Social Capital Revolution in Residential Property on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

Social capital has pervaded property law, with scholars and policymakers advocating laws and property arrangements to promote social capital and relying on social capital to devolve property governance from legal institutions to resident groups. This Article challenges the prevailing view of social capital’s salutary effects with a more skeptical account that examines the dark side of residential social capital — its capacity to effectuate local factions and promote restraints and inegalitarianism that close off property. I introduce a set of claims about social capital’s dark side in residential property and explore these points through the examples of local racial purging, land cartels, and residential self-governance. First, contrary to the assumption of a social capital deficit, residential racial segregation and land cartelization, perhaps the deepest imprints on the American property landscape today, suggest an abundance of local social capital and possible unintended consequences of interventions to build social capital. Second, “governing by social capital,” or relying on social capital for property self-governance, may empower factions, breed conflict, and increase the demand for residential homogeneity as a proxy for cooperation. In light of the mixed evidence for social capital’s benefits and its sizable dark side, the more pressing and productive role for property law is not to promote social capital, but to address its negative spillovers and illiberal effects.

Steve Clowney