Over the past several years, the landscape of K–12 education policy has shifted dramatically, thanks in part to increasing prevalence of parental-choice policies, including intra- and inter-district public school choice, charter schools, and private-school choice policies like vouchers and (most recently) universal education savings accounts. These policies decouple property and education by delinking students’ educational options from their...
Property Law
Many states turn in sizable part to local property taxes to finance public education. Political and academic discourse on the extent to which these taxes should serve in this role largely centers on second-order issues, such as the vices and virtues of local control, the availability of mechanisms to redistribute property tax revenues across school districts, and the overall stability of those revenues. This Essay contends that such discourse would...
Across the country, violent tactics were employed to create and maintain all-white municipalities. The legacy of that violence endures today. An underexamined space in which that violence endures is within school districts. Many school district boundary lines encompass geographic areas that were created as whites-only municipalities through both physical violence and law. Yet principles that inform how school district boundary lines are drawn fail...
Previous work suggests that excludability is the main attribute of educational property and residence is the lynchpin of that exclusion. Once a child is non-excludable, the story goes, he should have complete access to the benefits of educational property. This Essay suggests a challenge to the idea that exclusion is the main attribute of educational property. By following four fictional children and their quests to own educational property in...
Property law is having a moment, one that is getting education scholars’ attention. Progressive scholars are retooling the concepts of ownership and entitlement to incorporate norms of equality and inclusion. Some argue that property law can even secure access to public education despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s longstanding refusal to recognize a right to basic schooling. Others worry that property doctrine is inherently exclusionary. In their...
In 2021, California became the first U.S. state to require that public high schools teach ethnic studies. Given polarized politics over what that mandate might mean, this Essay reflects on the role of ethnic studies curriculum in one place, through the voices of three people. The place is Stockton—the most diverse city in America and home to more than twenty years of grassroots investment in ethnic studies courses. Oral histories from three generations...
Property law responds poorly to the lived reality of the climate crisis. In particular, it fails to address the uncontrollable negative externalities endemic to this crisis. Today, we need and share resources from which it would be ineffective and harmful to exclude our neighbors. Yet exclusion remains the cornerstone of much of American property law. In turn, the principle of autonomy—broadly defined to signify privacy, self-sufficiency, and...
Gregory Ablavsky’s Federal Ground explains how the national government and American law were transformed in the federal territories that compose modern Ohio and Tennessee. Ablavsky’s careful research and fresh perspective will make his work a vital reference for historians, but this Book Review also highlights the book’s significance for legal academics and lawyers. Ablavsky has collected extraordinary evidence about property...
In District of Columbia v. Wesby, the Supreme Court determined that a prudent officer had probable cause to arrest attendees at a festive house party for criminal trespass without a warrant. While reactions from scholars of criminal law have begun to emerge, this Piece is the first to conceive of the decision through the lens of property theory. In this regard, the Piece offers two principal claims. First, on interpretive grounds, it contends that,...
Partial takings allow the government to expropriate the parts of an asset it needs, leaving the owner the remainder. Both vital and common, partial takings present unique challenges to the standard rules of eminent domain. Partial takings may result in the creation of suboptimal, and even unusable, parcels. Additionally, partial takings create assessment problems that do not arise when parcels are taken as a whole. Finally, partial takings engender...