U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practioners are primarily focused on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet, the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic...

Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. This Essay argues that Desmond's mostly federal legal prescriptions are insufficient to help...

The evolution of community economic development (CED) over the past several decades has witnessed dramatic growth in scale and complexity. New approaches to development and related lawyering, and to philosophies underlying these approaches, challenge us to reimagine the framework of CED. From...

This brief to the Texas Supreme Court was filed by the Amici Curiae, including local, state, and national preservation organizations and legal scholars, to inform the court about background legal principles regarding zoning and historic preservation law. The Amici lay out reasons why the...

This article argues for the socially optimal regulation of online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and crowdfunding to advance economic justice in the United States. Peer-to-peer lending websites, such as Prosper.com or Kiva.org, facilitate lending transactions between individuals online without the...

The human right to housing, although not a formal American federal or constitutional right, provides an important legal and normative framework that can help American cities and states better balance the needs of owners and non-owners in local housing and development struggles. If American...

The efficacy of the public-private partnership as a tool for social reform is the subject of continued scholarly and public debate. New governance theory, an increasingly popular form of jurisprudence, constructs an optimistic vision of stakeholder collaboration in public - private partnerships...

Co-Cities by Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione (MIT Press, 2022) is a tour de force. They provide a rigorous empirical analysis of more than 200 global cities, and over 500 case studies within those metropolises, to reconceptualize “the city” for the contemporary age. (p. 24) While many...