Property
Garcia v. Google and a "Related Rights" Alternative to Copyright in Acting Performances
Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power
122 Yale L.J. 1738 (2013). It is black-letter law that the federal government has the power to take land through eminent domain. This modern understanding, however, is a complete departure from the Constitution’s historical meaning. From the Founding until the Civil War, the federal government was thought to have an eminent domain power only within the District of Columbia and the territories—but not within states. Politicians and judges (including in two Supreme Court decisions) repeatedly denied the existence of such a power, and when the federal government did need to take land, it relied on state cooperation to do so. People during this period refused to infer a federal eminent domain power from Congress’s enumerated powers or the Necessary and Proper Clause because they viewed it as a “great power”—one that was too important to be left to implication. And they refused to infer it from the Takings Clause either, because the Clause was not intended to expand Congress's power beyond the District and territories. Eminent domain aside, the notion of great powers is increasingly relevant after National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, in which Chief Justice Roberts invoked a theory of great powers to argue that the Necessary and Proper Clause could not justify the individual mandate. While his application of the theory is questionable, there are many other areas of law—such as commandeering, sovereign immunity, conscription, and the freedom of the press—where the great powers idea may rightfully have more bearing.
Spite and Extortion: A Jurisdictional Principle of Abuse of Property Right
122 Yale L.J. 1444 (2013). This Essay puts forward the conceptual and normative underpinnings of a principle of abuse of property right. Owners abuse their right, I argue, when their decisions about a thing are designed just to produce harm. This is so whether that harm is an end in itself (spite) or a means to achieving some ulterior and possibly even valuable end (extortion). Theorists have tried to explain those limits concerned with spite in terms of maximizing utility or enforcing virtue. But these theories posit significant external limits on owners’ freedom and still do not explain those limits concerned with extortion. I argue that ownership’s political foundations account for its internal limits. Ownership confers the authority to answer what I call the Basic Question—what constitutes a worthwhile use of a thing. This authority is required to overcome twin problems of standing and coordination in a state of nature. We all have an interest in coordinating our uses of things (to avoid waste and conflict), but each of us faces a moral duty to forbear from imposing his answer to the Basic Question on others. A system of private property overcomes this dilemma, but its political foundations also give rise to constraints of legitimacy. Owners are charged with making decisions about things, but this authority does not extend to using a resource to gratify spite or gain leverage for some further end. These are not answers to the Basic Question, but rather efforts to use the position of ownership just in order to dominate others. When owners exceed their authority in this way, they abuse their right.
Unbundling Homeownership: Regional Reforms from the Inside Out
119 Yale L.J. 1904 (2010).
Eminent Domain Due Process
119 Yale L.J. 1280 (2010). This Note analyzes the apparent disconnect between eminent domain doctrine and due process doctrine. Following Kelo, numerous states have reformed their eminent domain laws in an effort to ensure that the takings power is not abused. Whatever one makes of these legislative reforms, at an absolute minimum, the Due Process Clause should guarantee that landowners receive notice and an opportunity for some sort of judicial determination of the legality of the taking before the land is actually taken. After cataloging existing eminent domain laws, this Note traces the evolution of these laws over time in both the legislatures and the courts. In parallel, this Note analyzes the evolving circumstances driving the judicial perception of eminent domain. Examining these facts, the Note explains why courts have failed to rein in the eminent domain power with procedural protections. After establishing the appropriateness of applying modern due process principles to eminent domain actions, the focus of the inquiry shifts to what procedural due process demands. This colloquy explains what process is due, what the content and form of that process should be, and the likely effects of recognizing due process rights in the eminent domain context.
In Defense of Property
118 Yale L.J. 1022 (2009). This Article responds to an emerging view, in scholarship and popular society, that it is normatively undesirable to employ property law as a means of protecting indigenous cultural heritage. Recent critiques suggest that propertizing culture impedes the free flow of ideas, speech, and perhaps culture itself. In our view, these critiques arise largely because commentators associate “property” with a narrow model of individual ownership that reflects neither the substance of indigenous cultural property claims nor major theoretical developments in the broader field of property law. Thus, departing from the individual rights paradigm, our Article situates indigenous cultural property claims, particularly those of American Indians, in the interests of “peoples” rather than “persons,” arguing that such cultural properties are integral to indigenous group identity or peoplehood, and deserve particular legal protection. Further, we observe that whereas individual rights are overwhelmingly advanced by property law’s dominant ownership model, which consolidates control in the title-holder, indigenous peoples often seek to fulfill an ongoing duty of care toward cultural resources in the absence of title. To capture this distinction, we offer a stewardship model of property to explain and justify indigenous peoples’ cultural property claims in terms of nonowners’ fiduciary obligations toward cultural resources. We posit that re-envisioning cultural property law in terms of peoplehood and stewardship more fully illuminates both the particular nature of indigenous claims and the potential for property law itself to embrace a broader and more flexible set of interests.
The Ideology of Authorship Revisited: Authors, Markets, and Liberal Values in Early American Copyright
118 Yale L.J. 186 (2008). The concept of the author is deemed to be central to copyright law. An important strand of copyright scholarship explores how the development of modern copyright law was intertwined with the rise of a new ideology of authorship as an individualist act of creation ex nihilo. This Article remedies two common shortcomings of this scholarship: implying that the process of embedding original authorship in copyright law was complete by the end of the eighteenth century, and presenting the relation between the ideology of authorship and copyright law as an exact correlation. These two shortcomings neglect the complexity of the interaction between authorship and copyright law and attract the criticism that much of modern copyright doctrine seems diametrically opposed to the presuppositions of original authorship. This Article focuses on copyright law and discourse in nineteenth-century America. It argues that much of the weaving of the ideology of authorship into copyright law took place during this later period and in three main contexts: originality doctrine, the emergence of the notion of copyright as ownership of an intellectual work, and the rules that allocate initial copyright ownership. The result was the modern structure of copyright-authorship discourse as a motivated distortion. Various parts of this discourse incorporate conflicting images and assumptions about authorship, which often stand in tension with the legal doctrines of copyright and their actual effects. These patterns, which still dominate copyright law today, are traceable to the history of the power struggles, economic interest motivations, and the ideological constraints that produced them.
Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information
This Article proposes that intellectual property’s close relationship to property stems from the role that information costs play in the delineation and enforcement of exclusion rights. As theorists have emphasized, the nonrivalness of information causes exclusive rights to be more costly in terms of forgone use than in the law of tangible property. But if intellectual property does not solve a problem of allocation, it can play a role in allowing those who find and develop information to appropriate the returns from their rival inputs. It is on the cost side that exclusion emerges as a possible shortcut: exclusive rights in information are simple, indirect, and low-cost devices for solving the problem of appropriating the returns from these rival inputs. Building on a framework that identifies exclusion and governance as complementary strategies for defining property rights, the Article derives some propositions about which factors can be expected to push toward and away from exclusion in delineating entitlements to information. The role that exclusion plays in keeping the system of entitlements over information modular—allowing information to be hidden behind metaphorical boundaries—is both its strength and its weakness. Because exclusion is both more costly and potentially more beneficial as interconnected information becomes more valuable, it is an empirical question whether we would expect more exclusion—and whether it would be desirable. The Article uses this information-cost theory to explain some of the basic differences between the more tort-like copyright regime and the more property-like patent law. The information-cost theory also has implications for suggestive sources of empirical evidence on the structure of entitlements, such as rules within business organizations. Intellectual property, like property in general, can be seen as (at best) a second-best solution to a complex coordination problem of attributing outputs to inputs. 116 Yale L.J. 1742 (2007).
Reluctant Nationalists: Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Republican Era, 1801-1829
In 1801 the Jeffersonian Republicans took charge of Congress, the presidency, and the national administration, determined to roll back the state-building excesses of their Federalist predecessors. In this effort they were partially successful. But the tide of history and the demands of a growing nation confounded their ambitions. While reclaiming democracy they also built administrative capacity. This Article examines administrative structure and accountability in the Republican era in an attempt to understand the “administrative law” of the early nineteenth century. That inquiry proceeds through two extended case studies: the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807-1809 and the multi-decade federal effort to survey and sell the ever-expanding “public domain.” The first was the most dramatic regulation of commerce attempted by an American national government either before or since. The second began a land office business that dominated the political and legal consciousness of the nation for nearly a century. The embargo tested the limits of administrative coercion and revealed an escalating conflict between the necessities of regulatory administration and judicial review in common law forms. The sale of the public domain required the creation of the first mass administrative adjudication system in the United States and revealed both the ambitions and the limits of congressional control of administration in a polity ideologically devoted to assembly government. Together these cases describe the early-nineteenth-century approach to a host of familiar topics in contemporary administrative law: presidential versus congressional control of administration, the propriety and forms of administrative adjudication, policy implementation via general rules, and the appropriate role of judicial review. Perhaps most significantly, both the embargo episode and the efforts to privatize the public domain demonstrate the singular importance of internal administrative control and accountability in maintaining neutrality and consistency in the application of federal law. This “internal law of administration” remains both a crucial and an understudied aspect of American administrative governance. 116 Yale L.J. 1636 (2007).
Property and Half-Torts
116 Yale L.J. 1400 (2007) The idea that a tort can be split analytically into two parts—risk and harm—underlies a great deal of torts scholarship. Yet the notion has been all but ignored by property scholars employing Calabresi and Melamed’s famous entitlement framework. Thus, in discussing an “entitlement to pollute,” scholars rarely distinguish inputs to pollution (a factory’s emission of fumes from a smokestack) from outcomes of pollution (a neighbor’s grimy linens or respiratory distress). Instead, “pollution” is viewed as a single unified event that one party or the other receives an entitlement to control. This failure to conceptually separate risky inputs from harmful outcomes has led to imprecise and inaccurate ways of thinking and talking about entitlements. Property theory has suffered as a result, as has our understanding of how property and torts relate to each other. In this Article, I make a start at bringing the concept of the divided tort—here termed “half-torts”—into the property picture. Doing so generates a reformulated entitlement framework that fits more comfortably with moral intuitions, highlights the potential roles of luck and self-help in producing outcomes, and clarifies the available menu of alternatives for addressing property conflicts. The approach taken here advances a functional view of property as a container designed to collect inputs and outcomes with some regularity.
Searching for Balance in the Aftermath of the 2006 Takings Initiatives
116 Yale L.J. 1518 (2007) The partial regulatory takings movement seeks to compensate private landowners when regulations diminish their land values. This movement has grown in recent years, particularly at the state level. Scholars have focused thus far on the cost of compensation and its effect on the regulations that governments enact or enforce. In addition to exploring those concerns, this Note argues that partial regulatory takings regimes threaten to constrain residents’ ability to influence their communities’ growth and character. The greatest impact could fall on low-income communities, many of which contain disproportionate levels of undesirable land uses and lack adequate financial resources to influence land use planning in the absence of regulatory solutions or alternative venues. To address these problems, state and local governments should implement what I call a “regulatory balances” regime, strengthening participatory planning venues and funding the resulting measures.