This Article argues that the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause should apply differently to local governments than to higher levels of government. The Takings Clause is at the heart an increasingly contentious property rights ...

This brief Essay, part of a Fordham Urban Law Journal Symposium on eminent domain in New York, argues that there is a seldom-recognized purpose to eminent domain: preserving the ability of elected representatives to respond ...

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 ...

This Article identifies property law's special protection for existing uses, explores possible justifications for this protection, and argues that none can support the strong protection that existing uses currently enjoy. ...

Local governments typically insure themselves against all kinds of losses, from property damage to legal liability. For small- and medium-sized governments, this usually means purchasing insurance from private insurers or ...

This Article proposes that local governments should be able to decide for themselves how to protect private property, and then be held to that choice as if it were a local constitutional pre-commitment. Specifically, the ...

This Essay offers a broad gloss on the traditional politics of property protection and then catalogues a number of ways in which those politics have been changing. In many cases, the account is of fragmentation and fracture ...

Anti-entrenchment rules prevent governments from passing unrepealable legislation and ensure that subsequent governments are free to revisit the policy choices of the past. However, governments — and local governments in ...

The term “exclusionary zoning” typically describes a particular phenomenon: suburban large-lot zoning that reduces the supply of developable land and drives up housing prices. But exclusionary zoning in its modern form ...

This Article argues for a new and unexpected mechanism of judicial accountability: suing courts. Current models of court accountability focus almost entirely on correcting legal errors. A suit against the court would ...