PropertyProf Blog

Today's Architecture Moment: Toyo Ito WIns Pritzker Prize

Japanese architect Toyo Ito has been awarded the 2013 Pritzker architecture prize, the field's most prestigious award.

Here's a slideshow of his work.

Steve Clowney

Map of the Day: The Luck of the Irish

The map below approximates "the percentage of bars and restaurants in the city that are Irish pubs. By combing through Open Street Map, Wikis, Facebook, and other open-source data, the algorithm selects both establishments that self-identify as Irish or Celtic and those that have spawned talk of, say, Guinness on social media."

Steve Clowney

Balganesh on Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism

Shyamkrishna Balganesh (Penn) has posted Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Mahatma Gandhi is revered the world over for his views on freedom and non-violence, ideas that he deployed with great success during India’s freedom struggle. As a thinker, he is commonly believed to have been a moral perfectionist: anti-utilitarian in mindset and deeply skeptical of market mechanisms. Yet, when he engaged with the institution of copyright law during his lifetime — as a writer, editor, and publisher — his approach routinely abjured the idealism of his abstract thinking in favor of a lawyerly pragmatism. Characterized by a nuanced, internal understanding of the institution and its conflicting normative goals, Gandhi’s thinking on copyright law reveals a reasoned, contextual, and incremental transformation over time, as the economic and political circumstances surrounding his engagement with copyright changed. In it we see a dimension of Gandhi’s thinking that has thus far been ignored, emanating from his training as a common lawyer. This Essay traces the development of Gandhi’s views on copyright to show how he anticipated several of the central debates and controversies that are today the staple of the copyright wars, and developed an approach to dealing with copyright’s various problems, best described as “copyright pragmatism.” As an approach that draws on legal and philosophical pragmatism, copyright pragmatism entails a critical engagement with copyright as a legal institution on its own terms, but contextually and with an eye towards its various costs, benefits, and normative goals at each stage of engagement. The Essay then unpacks the analytical moves that copyright pragmatism entails to show how it holds important lessons for the future of copyright thinking and reform.

Steve Clowney

Need a Property Visitor in 2013-2014?

Here's a message from Dale Whitman, professor of property at Missouri.

Friends: I'm interested in teaching as a visitor at another law school (or two) during the 2013-2014 academic year (Fall 2013 and Winter 2014).

My usual courses are:
Property (any portion or all)
Real Estate Finance
Land Use Planning
Advanced Real Estate Development

I would consider any area of the US, but have a mild preference for warm sunny regions during the Winter. Either a one-semester or full-year visit might be of interest to me.

Dale Whitman
Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Missouri
[email protected]
573-356-9371
(I’ll be out of the country on Spring Break until March 25.)

Dale is too modest to say in his email, but he's definitively one of the nation's leading experts on property law. He served as co-reporter of the ALI's Restatement (Third) of Property (Mortgages) and has collaborated on five casebooks in real estate finance and property.

Steve Clowney

Carbon Beach Update

Eduardo Peñalver reminds me that Carbon Beach has been the locus for a number of infamous property battles.  It played a role in the fight for beach access in California, which the well-heeled owners of Carbon Beach waterfront property perpetrated back in 2005.

It was also the location of the fight between David Geffen and the Coastal Commission, which stretched over nearly a decade and inspired several Doonsebury strips.

Steve Clowney

Blocher on Selling State Borders

Joseph Blocher (Duke) has posted Selling State Borders (Penn Law Review) on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

Sovereign territory was bought and sold throughout much of American history, and there are good reasons to think that an interstate market for borders could help solve many contemporary economic and political problems. But no such market currently exists. Why not? And could an interstate market for sovereign territory help simplify border disputes, resolve state budget crises, respond to exogenous shocks like river accretion, and improve democratic responsiveness? Focusing on the sale of borders among American states, this Article offers constitutional, political, and ethical answers to the first question, and a qualified yes to the second.

Steve Clowney

Welcome to Billionare's Row

Morgan Brennan takes a quick look at Carbon Beach in Los Angeles, generally regarded as one of the priciest stretches of real estate in the world:

Subdivided by Malibu's founding family, the Rindges, in the 1930s, Carbon now commands upward of $200,000 per foot of beachfront. The draw for Hollywood's power players? It's the city's deepest, driest strip of sand and less than 20 miles from Tinseltown. "Carbon Beach is home to the people who write the checks in Hollywood," says Stephen Shapiro of Westside Estate Agency. And the beach has public access, so go hang ten -- ten figures.

Steve Clowney

Sepe & White on the Effects of Urban Disorder

Simone Sepe (Arizona) and Brent White (Arizona) have posted The New City Beautiful: Urban Infrastructure and the Rule of Law on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

This article argues that urban physical disorder weakens the relational social contract upon which the rule of law is built. Under this social contract, citizens follow legal rules in exchange for certain goods and services from the government, and citizens conditionally cooperate with each other, following the rules because others follow the rules as well. Urban physical disorder, as evidenced by crumbling urban infrastructure, signals both that the government is not fulfilling its obligations under the social contract and that others are not following the rules, contributing to a downward spiral that ultimately leads to a culture unsupportive of the rule of law.

To test this theoretical account, this article analyzes empirical data from 124 countries related to the quality of the urban environment and the degree of commitment to the rule of law, as measured by perceived corruption. This analysis shows that the rule of law is both strongly correlated and causally dependent upon the quality of the urban environment. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that austerity is an effective means of controlling corruption, this article thus suggests that public investment in urban infrastructure and the creation of quality urban environments are essential components of efforts to cultivate and maintain the rule of law.

Steve Clowney

Rissman on Conservation Easements for Wildlife Conservation

Adena Rissman (Wisconsin - Ecology) has posted Rethinking Property Rights: Comparative Analysis of Conservation Easements for Wildlife Conservation (Environmental Conservation) on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Conservation easements (or conservation covenants) are commonly conceptualized as acquisitions of sticks in a ‘bundle of rights’ and are increasingly implemented for wildlife conservation on private lands. This research asks: (1) What are the possibilities and limitations of the conservation easement approach to wildlife conservation in contrasting rural and periurban regions? and (2) How does analysis of conservation easements differ when examining property as a bundle of rights or alternative metaphors? These questions were addressed through document analysis, interviews and GIS mapping in two regions where The Nature Conservancy deployed conservation easements for wildlife habitat: rural Lassen Foothills and periurban Tenaja Corridor, USA. Splitting the bundle allowed for site and region-specific easements with differences in permitted housing densities, land management and hunting. Easements focused on restricted rights rather than affirmative duties. The challenges of habitat connectivity in the fragmented Tenaja Corridor revealed the limits of parcel-based acquisition. Analysts and conservation practitioners should rethink the bundle of rights concept of property, considering a bundle of duties, powers and owners within a broader web of social and ecological interests, to understand the role of conservation acquisitions in contrasting landscape contexts.

Steve Clowney

Does Privatizing Public Housing Lands Make Sense?

New York City is considering leasing public housing land to private developers so they can construct market rate apartment buildings.  Most of the land in question is currently used as common space by the tenants of housing projects -- basketball courts, parking lots and outdoor plazas.  The dollars generated by the sales would be used to repair decades-old public housing buildings.  Not everyone is enthusiastic:

"So now you want to put in these huge buildings, block our view, take away the play areas that we have," [Aixa Torres] said. "And at the end of the day, segregate it."

Torres, the tenant association president, said the housing authority wants to demolish a baseball field and a parking lot in her complex to make room for the new apartments.

The baseball field is a spot where families like to picnic in the summer. And it's where the development's large Asian community likes to conduct daily tai chi exercises.

"I just think they're looking at the fact that this is waterfront property, and why should we have that view?" Torres said. "That's the way I feel."

 

Steve Clowney

Can Private Property Save the Rhino?

Kevin Redmon explains that government regulations designed to protect the rhino from poaching have failed:

Despite being banned in 1977, the rhino horn trade is flourishing. Twenty years ago, a kilo of horn went for $4,700. Today, it sells for $65,000, making it more valuable than either gold or cocaine. Poaching is on the rise, and by some accounts, the number of endangered (but not yet extinct) white rhino killed doubles each year. By 2035, African wildlands could be devoid of the animal.

Redmon then pushes for a controversial proposal to allow "horn farming" on private game reserves:

"Rhino horn is composed entirely of keratin and regrows when cut,” writes Biggs. “Sedating a rhino to shave its horn can be done for as little as $20.” A white rhino produces about a kilo of horn per year, and the current global demand could be met by “farming” as few as 5,000 animals on a private, well-guarded preserve. (Natural rhino death “would also provide hundreds of horns annually,” even as the herd continues to grow at a rate near 10 percent.) The millions of dollars generated by the legal enterprise could be used to fund further conservation efforts, such as wildland preservation, sustainable rural development, and field research.

Steve Clowney

(HT: Andrew Sullivan)

 

Analytical Alchemists and the Property Inspection Revolution

Slate looks at how Mike Flowers used "big data" to revolutionize the way New York conducts building inspections:

Among the first challenges the team tackled was “illegal conversions”—the practice of cutting up a dwelling into many smaller units so that it can house as many as 10 times the number of people it was designed for. They are major fire hazards, as well as cauldrons of crime, drugs, disease, and pest infestation. A tangle of extension cords may snake across the walls; hot plates sit perilously on top of bedspreads. People packed this tightly regularly die in blazes. In 2005 two firefighters died trying to rescue residents. New York City gets roughly 25,000 illegal-conversion complaints a year, but it has only 200 inspectors to handle them. There seemed to be no good way to distinguish cases that were simply nuisances from ones that were poised to burst into flames. To Flowers and his kids, though, this looked like a problem that could be solved with lots of data.

They started with a list of every property lot in the city—all 900,000 of them. Next they poured in datasets from 19 different agencies indicating, for example, if the building owner was delinquent in paying property taxes, if there had been foreclosure proceedings, and if anomalies in utilities usage or missed payments had led to any service cuts. They also fed in information about the type of building and when it was built, plus ambulance visits, crime rates, rodent complaints, and more. Then they compared all this information against five years of fire data ranked by severity and looked for correlations in order to generate a system that could predict which complaints should be investigated most urgently.

Steve Clowney

Burger & Frymer on Property Law and American Empire

Michael Burger (Roger Williams) and Paul Frymer (Princeton - Politics) have posted Property Law and American Empire (Hawaii Law Review) on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Current scholarship by legal commentators and political scientists recognizes that the weapons of American empire have involved non-militaristic activities as much as militaristic ones. Such non-militaristic activities include the hegemonic influence of trade agreements, the imposition of legal and procedural norms, and the dissemination of ideological and cultural predispositions through corporations and diverse medias. In this paper, we examine an under-explored area on the “soft” belly of the American leviathan, focusing specifically on how property and intellectual property law have operated on physical and ideological frontiers to comprehend, participate in, and legitimate the expansion of American empire. We offer new accounts of two historical instances of empire-building: the acquisition and seizure of property from Native Americans in the early- and mid-19th century, and the expropriation of intellectual property rights to plant genetic resources from indigenous communities in the global South in the late 20th century. These two stories, taken together, offer unique insights into both the process and the substance of law’s operation on the frontier of empire. They illuminate how the authority of law has fused with private power and legal legitimacy to enable the nation to expand swiftly, energetically, and powerfully. These insights, in turn, lead toward the more general conclusion that the rhetoric of property has functioned to subjugate peoples and places, cultures and natures, to an imperial regime.

Steve Clowney

Teaching Property by Flipping the Classroom

One thing that I probably don't blog about enough is teaching methodology.  That's why I was particularly excited to receive the following email from Property Prof, friend-of-the-blog, and all-round good guy Tim Iglesias (I post this with Tim's gracious permission):

As I'm sure you know, there's been a lot of discussion around revising teaching methods lately, in part as a response to the crises in legal education and the job market.

One method that's been touted quite a bit in elementary and high school teaching and more recently in undergraduate education is "flipping the classroom," i.e. providing students with (and expecting them to absorb) "content" before the class meeting (either by written materials, by pre-recorded lectures they can watch or by on-line materials), and then using the class meeting for analysis, problem-solving and exercises rather than "information transfer." Of course, in one sense, that is what the traditional Socratic Method aspires to. In any case, I'm considering doing some variation of "flipping" for at least some topics in my Property Law course. And, rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm interested to know if any Property Law professors have tried it and are willing to share their "lessons learned" or, even better, their materials.

I'm curious about this as well.  Has anyone out there had any experiences with this methodology? 

Steve Clowney

Tirres on Property Law as Immigration Law

Allison Tirres (DePaul) has posted Property Law as Immigration Law: The Creation of Non-Citizen Property Rights on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

This Article explores the collusion of states and the federal government in encouraging migration and expanding notions of membership in the American polity. It is the first sustained treatment of the creation of property rights for non-citizens in American law. In the mid-nineteenth century, eleven states adopted provisions in their constitutions guaranteeing the property rights of resident aliens. Prior to this period, state courts had restricted non-citizen property rights, applying English common law doctrine. Under the common law, aliens were unable lawfully to hold or inherit property; the sovereign could force a property forfeiture at any time. Additions to state constitutions dramatically altered this scheme. Iowa, Wisconsin, California and Michigan led the way, including these rights in their state constitutions prior to the Civil War. In this article, I place these constitutional developments in the larger context of the histories of immigration, westward expansion, and property reform. I show that federal territorial law played a critical role in the expansion of non-citizen property rights at the state level. Federal law allowed for fee simple alien property ownership and alien suffrage; these rights directly influenced proponents of state property reform. I argue that both the federal government and the states utilized property law as a form of immigration regulation: not to expel migrants but rather to attract them. At the same time, these reform efforts held the seeds of restrictive policies that would develop later in the twentieth century. Becoming “American” through property ownership was not a fully inclusive process; from the outset it was limited by assumptions about origin, race, and territorial location.

Steve Clowney

Can SimCity Teach Us Anything About the Cities of the Future?

SimCity is an urban-planning/city-building video game and one of the best-selling computer games of all-time.  The newest reboot of the series, SimCity (2013), was released this week to much critical acclaim. Over at Slate, Adam Sneed asks if the game can teach us anything about the future of urban planning:

Another way SimCity accurately captures in the leading edge of urban planning is through its use of Big Data. Cities around the world are using sensors to measure everything from energy and water usage to pollution levels and crime trends. The game puts the player at the helm of the ultimate smart city as it tracks just about every metric of life in the simulation. At the click of a button, dynamic, colorful maps—inspired by the infographics of data scientist Edward Tufte—present real-time data on traffic, crime, pollution, public health, property values, and much more. (There’s even a map showing human waste as it flows to sewage treatment plants—a gross, mesmerizing way to find the tempo of a city.)

The real problem for the game’s designers: figuring out how to turn massive amounts of data into meaningful information. “We knew from previous SimCitys that there’s this data overload that can happen that turns off a lot of players,” said Stone Librande, SimCity’s lead designer. [...] That’s a fact that real cities need to realize as they embrace technology and data to help inform their citizens. They can collect and release all kinds of data, but it’s essentially meaningless if it’s not presented in a useful way.

Property Profs may also enjoy that FastCoExist brought together a bunch of urban planners to play SimCity, thinking that they would come together to create an urban utopia, yet the planners ended up becoming awfully competitive.

Steve Clowney

Levine-Schnur on Agreements Between Municipalities and Land Developers

Ronit Levine-Schnur (Hebrew University) has posted Bargained Land Development and the Rationales of Land Use Law on bepress.  Here's the abstract:

In the coming months, the United States Supreme Court will hand down its decision in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, a high-profile “takings” case that will set the precedent for what legal requirements govern land development negotiations between land owners and local authorities. This Article addresses an important normative gap in the legal theory that the Court will have to address: assuming that bargained agreements between municipalities and land developers is a necessary step in the land development process, what substantive legal principle should govern their legitimacy?

This Article draws upon the theory and practical realities underlying contemporary land use law to articulate a clear substantive legal construct for evaluating bargained land development. The efficiency and public policy rationales of this construct are then discussed. Ultimately, the questions to be considered are to what extent was the existing regulation changed to meet the developer’s request and to what extent this change enabled the developer to internalize urban surpluses. The level of discretion afforded to local governments in their negotiations with property owners will hinge upon the application of these considerations to the facts before the court.

Steve Clowney

The 30 Best Places To Be If You Love Books

Buzzfeed puts together a listicle of libraries, reading nooks, and book stores.

Steve Clowney

Martinez on Bikinis and Efficient Trespass Law

John Martinez (Utah) has posted Bikinis and Efficient Trespass Law on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

On Valentine’s Day 2013, a mother and her two daughters walked into a Barnes & Noble bookstore and put sticky notes strategically on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue featuring Kate Upton in a skimpy bikini. Current trespass law at times emphasizes that a mere physical intrusion suffices. Under that “right to exclude” approach, Barnes & Noble could easily prove that a trespass had occurred. At other times, however, trespass law focuses on the “right to use,” and instead seeks to determine whether any given intrusion interferes with the present beneficial use of the landowner’s premises. Using economic efficiency analysis, this article suggests that the right to exclude approach leads to fewer transaction costs and therefore is the economically efficient - and therefore preferable - legal rule.

Steve Clowney

Visualizing Inequality

This video about wealth inequality in America has gone viral:

Steve Clowney