Law of Eminent Domain

The first attempt to address comparative property law in a common integrative framework, this study discusses German, Italian, French, American, and British property law as mere variations based upon a few fundamental themes through which these nations developed legal systems to provide responses to common economic problems and to set legal foundations for working markets. Basic Principles of Property Law was produced to offer a common framework for the discussion of the law of property within countries in transition, thus it has its basis, not on just one legal system, but on the institutional commonalties that make western property law a working market institution. It offers a major challenge to conventional thinking that in property law the differences between common law and civil law are so important that "common core" research is impossible.

All solutions to environmental problems depend on the imposition of private, common, or public-property rights in natural resources. Who should own the resources: private individuals, private groups of "stakeholders", or the entire society (the public)? Contrary to much of the literature in this field, this book argues that no single property regime works best in all circumstances. Environmental protection requires the use of multiple property regimes--including admixtures of private, common, and public-property systems.

A compelling blend of legal and political history, this book chronicles the largest tenant rebellion in U.S. history. From its beginning in the rural villages of eastern New York in 1839 until its collapse in 1865, the Anti-Rent movement impelled the state's governors, legislators, judges, and journalists, as well as delegates to New York's bellwether constitutional convention of 1846, to wrestle with two difficult problems of social policy. One was how to put down violent tenant resistance to the enforcement of landlord property and contract rights. The second was how to abolish the archaic form of land tenure at the root of the rent strike.

Charles McCurdy considers the public debate on these questions from a fresh perspective. Instead of treating law and politics as dependent variables--as mirrors of social interests or accelerators of social change--he highlights the manifold ways in which law and politics shaped both the pattern of Anti-Rent violence and the drive for land reform. In theprocess, he provides a major reinterpretation of the ideas and institutions that diminished the promise of American democracy in the supposed "golden age" of American law and politics.

Farole examines the role of organized interest groups in rights litigation in state courts, analyzing factors affecting groups' willingness and ability to enter state litigation. Farole also investigates whether groups assert rights claims based on state constitutional law, as urged by proponents of the new judicial federalism.

Over the past two decades, the field of law and economics has matured to the point where scholars have employed the latest economic methods in an effort to understand the nature of legal rules and to guide legal reform. This book is the first to provide a broad survey of this scholarship as it has been applied to problems in torts, contracts, property, and litigation. It will therefore serve as a convenient reference guide to this exciting field.