Property
To Be Given to God: Contemporary Civil Forfeiture as a Taking
Civil asset forfeiture was once a law-enforcement tool. Today, however, police and prosecutors use forfeiture to fundraise, not to fight crime. This Note challenges the constitutionality of these profit-motivated government confiscations. It argues that these “contemporary civil forfeitures” are not forfeitures at all—they are compensable takings.
Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power
What is the source of jurisdictional power, or the power to say what the law is and give it force in a territory? This Article examines how this fundamental attribute of sovereignty historically arose, in America, from property and property institutions, especially the local, mundane, overlooked and bureaucratic title registry.
Churching NIMBYs: Creating Affordable Housing on Church Property
Faith communities across the United States are creating affordable housing on church property. Where sincerely held religious belief inspires their efforts, faith communities can assert religious liberty protections against land-use decisions that obstruct denser, multifamily developments. Legislative reforms can help them overcome the regulatory and financial hurdles of adaptive reuse.
The Illusory Promise of General Property Law
This Essay criticizes using “general” or federal property law to define constitutional rights, including protections against unlawful search and seizure. Federal property law is an ahistorical and indeterminate concept. Its ascendance in Takings Clause opinions illustrates its flaws and the risks it poses for beneficial variation in state property rules.
The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field
The version of American history we adopt matters for our understanding of law. In property law, we overlook how the land system underpinning the American real estate market developed, and how that market grew through racial inequality, if we do not examine conquest and slavery as foundational to the field.
Dismantling the Master’s House: Reparations on the American Plantation
In southeastern Louisiana, plantations still line the Mississippi River, surrounded by Black communities who experience these estates as sites of racialized harm. This Note explores the use of eminent domain to achieve land-based reparations for these descendants and draws lessons for reparations at other sites of historical and continued subjugation.
Retroactive Adjudication
This Article defends the inherent retroactivity of judicial lawmaking. It argues that there is no principled foundation for the Supreme Court’s non-retroactivity doctrine, and it provides an alternative framework: courts should always apply “new law” to old cases, and constrain its effects instead through well-recognized limitations on rights of action.
Condemning Worship: Religious Liberty Protections and Church Takings
This Note explores how courts interpret religious liberty protections when the government seeks to condemn property owned by faith communities (“church takings”), revealing how judges discriminate between types of religious property. While protecting houses of worship, courts allow condemning authorities to take other properties integral to communities’ religious missions.
Public Rights of First Refusal
This Note provides the first study of public rights of first refusal, an underappreciated land-use power that governments use to acquire property. It argues that these rights can, under certain conditions, provide a means of balancing individual and collective needs that is superior to both eminent domain and regular purchasing.
The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds
Property scholarship has long derided metes and bounds systems of land demarcation, largely accepting that standardized boundaries best facilitate economic growth. Through a case study of colonial New Haven, Connecticut, this Article suggests that metes and bounds descriptions actually provided early Americans significant social and economic benefits.