Re-Placing Property

This Article analyzes the complex relationship between property and placemaking. Our most basic property and land tenure choices—including the design of the fee simple itself—shape people-place relations in powerful ways. By unearthing this important relationship between property and placemaking, this Article also reveals how pervasive—but unorganized—claims about place and place attachment already are across a range of modern land conflicts. Because property theory has not been fully transparent about many of these placemaking effects, our property choices often result in outcomes that are unequal, inconsistent, and opaque, prioritizing some existing place relations while ignoring or rejecting others. By building a more comprehensive placemaking account—with examples from Indigenous pipeline protestors to the absent and now-urban heirs of family farms and the emergence of new build-to-rent suburban housing divisions—this Article introduces a new taxonomy for evaluating the relative protection we afford to various place and place-attachment claims. This new framework separates the individual, collective, and ecological benefits of positive place relations from the risks of either overprotected place attachments (as in the case of hereditary land dynasties and exclusionary wealth) or land ownership without any attachment at all (as in the transformation of land and housing into asset classes for commodification and financialized capture). This clearer focus on placemaking also puts property law—and land tenure— at the center of core social, economic, and climate challenges, including growing institutional and foreign investment in U.S. farmland (as rural landscapes depopulate and agriculture becomes even more industrialized) and private equity’s increasing appetite for single-family housing (as the United States’ glaring wealth gap continues to expand). It also forces us to confront property’s ongoing role in the dispossession of groups, cultures, and communities that are not (or are no longer) recognized as legal owners and our repeated failure to accommodate the access needs of individuals not born into hereditary land or wealth. Weaving together both rural and urban case studies, this Article ultimately offers novel entry points to some of property’s perennial problems, including pervasive distributional inequities, while providing new language and a fresh lens for reimagining more just and sustainable property relations for our rapidly changing world. In a final series of property-based personal stories, the article centers new forms of access rights—including some public rights over private properties—as instrumental to reconnecting and collectively reimagining the kinds of places we want to make together

19. Yugoslavia: Death of A Nation -- Part VI: Pax Americana

The Death of Yugoslavia (Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian: Smrt Jugoslavije, Macedonian: Смртта на Југославија, Smrtta na Jugoslavija), later retitled into Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation in an updated and revised edition, is a six part BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995, and also the name of a book written by Allan Little and Laura Silber that accompanies the series. The book and film cover the collapse of the former Yugoslavia from three decades ago. Notable in its combination of never-before-seen archive footage interspersed with interviews of most of the main players in the conflict, including Slobodan Milošević, the leader of Serb nationalism, then President of Serbia, through the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, to the war in Bosnia. Film footage does not extend as far as the Kosovo crisis or the secession of Montenegro. —————— Part 6: Pax Americana Croatia launches operation Operation Storm and recaptures most of territory of self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina which leads to mass exodus of Serbian population from Croatia. Bosnian Serb forces commit Srebrenica and Markale massacres. In response, NATO launches Operation Deliberate Force and bombs positions of Bosnian Serb forces, which forces Bosnian Serbs to return to negotiations. US brokeres Dayton Agreement which effectively ends the Bosnian war. (abstract from Simon Gros\u27s Vimeo page

In Re: Konata Matthews

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvani

Crystallex International Corp v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

USDC for the District of Delawar

LaMont’s Wild West Buffalo, LLC v. Nathanial Terry, 140 Nev. Adv. Op. 11 (Mar. 7, 2024)

The Nevada Rules of Civil Procedure (NRCP) 11(c)(2), NRS 180.010(2)(b) and NRS 7.085 are three different methods for petitioning the court to award attorney fees. It is an error to apply NRCP 11’s procedural requirements when denying a request for attorney fees under NRS 180.010(2)(b) and NRS 7.085

Marcel Ingram v. George Dunbar

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvani

Pleading Failures in Monell Litigation

The doctrine of municipal liability in cases brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 has been extensively criticized through widespread agreement that municipal liability claims are difficult for plaintiffs to win. Commentators generally blame stringent doctrinal and pleading standards for plaintiffs’ low rates of success. This Article reveals another important contributing factor: the poor quality of many pleadings filed on behalf of civil rights plaintiffs. We present original empirical research documenting widespread pleading failures, or omissions of basic doctrinal elements. Our research demonstrates that pleading failures are common: an analysis of the complaint in every case that resulted in a federal appellate decision in 2019 reveals that 56.5% of complaints filed by represented parties failed even to state the elements of any theory of municipal liability, let alone plead those elements sufficient to meet the demanding Iqbal pleading standard. The poor quality of civil rights complaints, while troubling, also offers an opportunity. Given that the current Supreme Court is unlikely to revise municipal liability doctrine, advocates would do well to focus efforts on improving the quality of complaints filed on behalf of civil rights plaintiffs. To this end, we identify areas in which complaints are particularly lacking and suggest ways to improve both the overall quality of attorney work product and the environment in which civil rights lawyering takes place