This article analyzes the development of eminent domain law, focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals' approach to the requirement that takings be for “public use.” It asserts that the Supreme Court's public use doctrine is conceptually incomplete. In applying...

This article reviews recent scholarship invoking the prophetic tradition in American jurisprudence and calling for the transformation of property law. It contrasts imposed top-down social change with Burkean and Oakeshottian gradual change derived from conversation within our legal and cultural...

This short article discusses urban redevelopment, and its relation to economic productivity and various concepts of well being. It notes that solutions adopted in one era are apt to be the problems of the next. The article then introduces the four articles comprising the George Mason Law Review...

In Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, a Supreme Court plurality asserted that takings liability could arise from judicial acts, as well as from state or local legislation and executive agency decisions. The Plurality's rationale supporting “judicial...

In Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York the Supreme Court stated that the existence of a regulatory taking would be determined through “essentially ad hoc, factual inquiries,” and that one of three factors of “particular significance” was the economic impact of the...

This article reviews the implications for land use policy of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Fifty years after its publication in 1961, Death and Life remains a clarion call for resistance to monolithic development and to the reigning paradigm of urban planning in the...

This Article explores the role of the Supreme Court's Penn Central line of regula-tory takings cases, from the premise that the purpose of the Penn Central doctrine is to advance fundamental fairness in an era of pervasive land use regulation. In particular, the Article focuses on whether the...

This essay, in a journal for professional planners and planning lawyers, proposes that the debate between advocates of private property rights and of expansive government regulation of land use be tempered by recognition that the U.S. Supreme Court's takings jurisprudence has not always been as...

This Article examines the varying and often-conflicting meanings and goals ascribed to the term “affordable housing.” It asserts that the term often serves as a metaphor; it obscures rather than clarifies, and contributes to the intractability of problems pertaining to housing from any...

City planning in America began as a Progressive Era exercise, intended to pre-serve property values and implicitly incorporate the social norms of officials and planners. Over time, rigid zoning was replaced by flexibility, accompanied by opaque bargaining between localities and developers....