PropertyProf Blog

NEW BOOK: Property Rights and Settlement in the Negev Region

Alexandre Kedar (University of Haifa), Ahmad Amara (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), and Oren Yiftachel (Ben-Gurion University) have published Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford University Press 2018). Here's a summary of the project

Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international-comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the “dead Negev doctrine” used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state. Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice.

Click here for purchase information (receive a 20% discount when you use the code "EMPTIED").

 

 

 

PROFESSORS' CORNER: The Uniform Directed Trust Act

The Recently Approved Uniform Directed Trust Act: A View from the Chair and Reporter

Speakers:

John D. Morley, Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Robert H. Sitkoff, John L. Gray Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Moderator:

David English, University of Missouri

Program Description
Across the centuries, the law of trusts evolved on the assumption that full power to administer a trust would belong to a trustee. A directed trust departs from this tradition by granting a power over a trust to a person who is not a trustee. The fundamental policy question arising from the emergence of directed trusts is how the law of trusteeship should be divided among a directed trustee and trust director. The Uniform Law Commission has just finished work on the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA), which provides clear, practical, and comprehensive solutions to all of the major legal difficulties in a directed trust. At the same time, the UDTA offers a host of technical innovations that dramatically improve on existing directed trust statutes, and that point to a variety of drafting practices for directed trusts that could be improved in all states. In this session, Professors Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) and John Morley (Yale), respectively the Chair and the Reporter for the UDTA drafting committee, will discuss the UDTA and what it means for directed trust practice.

Register now for this FREE program and join us every second Tuesday of each month for a discussion of these and other current issues.  (The content of this program does not meet requirements for continuing legal education (CLE) accreditation. You will not receive CLE credit for this program).

Rossi and Serkin on Using Land Use to Police Energy Externalities

Jim Rossi (Vanderbilt) and Chris Serkin (Vanderbilt) have posted Energy Exactions (Cornell Law Review) on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

Exactions are demands levied on residential or commercial developers to force them, rather than a municipality, to bear the costs of new infrastructure. Local governments commonly use them to address the burdens that growth places on schools, transportation, water, and sewers. But exactions almost never address energy needs, even though local land use decisions can create significant externalities for the power grid and for energy resources.

This Article proposes a novel reform to land use and energy law: “energy exactions”—understood as local fees or timing limits aimed at addressing the energy impacts of new residential or commercial development. Energy exactions would force developers to internalize the costs of growth on the energy grid, generate important information about community energy needs and their externalities, decentralize risk taking, promote technological change in new sources of power supply, and stimulate useful forms of regulatory competition between local communities and state utility regulators. In the process, they would induce energy conservation in the development of new residential and commercial buildings.

The Article defends the implementation of energy exactions by local governments. It then analyzes the potential legal hurdles energy exactions face, including their authorization, preemption by state utility laws, and implications under the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Energy exactions provide local governments a unique, pragmatic and valuable tool to integrate community values into energy grid planning, promote demand reduction, and enable new investments in low-carbon energy infrastructure.

NEW BOOK: Saxer and Rosenbloom on Economic, Environmental, and Social Systems

Shelley Ross Saxer (Pepperdine) and Jonathan Rosenbloom (Drake) just finished a book titled Social-Ecological Resilience and Sustainability (Aspen Coursebook Series). Great work to these two! Check it out below:

Social-Ecological Resilience and Sustainability by Shelley Ross Saxer and Jonathan Rosenbloom is designed to help students understand and address new, changing, and complex economic, environmental, and social systems. This book introduces resilience and sustainability as analytical frameworks and illustrates how these concepts apply in various contexts: water, food, shelter/land use, energy, natural resources, pollution, disaster law, and climate change. The first two chapters (Part I) provide students with a conceptual foundation to explore the interdisciplinary nature of resilience and sustainability and the meanings of, complexities embedded in, and the overlap and differences between these frameworks. Each of the remaining eight chapters (Part II) views resilience and sustainability in a specific law and policy context. Strategically placed throughout Part II, the authors describe eight useful tools — “Strategies to Facilitate Implementation”—to help identify, assess, integrate, or utilize resilience and sustainability as analytical frameworks.

Key Features:

• A two-part approach that first provides students with a conceptual foundation and then allows students to view resilience and sustainability in eight law and policy contexts (described above)
• Numerous graphics throughout to illustrate concepts, depict events described, and otherwise enliven the content
• Case studies that examine human decisions that led to unsustainable and non-resilient systems and societies
• New and innovative ways to explain complex systems and in turn rethink traditional notions of law and policy