Land can be inefficiently allocated when attempts to assemble separately-owned pieces of land into large parcels are frustrated by holdout landowners. The existing land-assembly institution of eminent domain can be used neither to gauge efficiency nor to determine how to compensate displaced...

One of the great successes of the law and economics movement has been the use of economic models to explain the structure and function of broad areas of law. The original contributions to this volume epitomize that tradition, offering state-of-the-art research on the many facets of economic...

The burden of redevelopment projects, whether or not they ultimately benefit the communities in which they are undertaken, is borne disproportionately by those displaced. Neighborhoods are destroyed and residents are made to leave a home they love, compensated only by its market value. The...

In Shapiro and Pincus (2008), we proposed a method for arriving at just compensation of private owners of urban land, in cases like Kelo v New London, in which government has plans to use eminent domain to `take' private properties, to be assembled into a single parcel for some public purpose....

Currently, the legitimate transfer of ownership of an asset occurs either through voluntary means - gift, bequest, sale - or through the use of state power - compulsory acquisition, resumption, eminent domain, court order. In Australia and elsewhere, compulsory acquisition of private property is...