Foreword Symposium: Fourth Annual Mid-Atlantic People ofColor Legal Scholarship Conference: Law and Literature: Examining the Limited Legal Imagination in the Traditional Legal Canon

The Fourth Annual Mid-Atlantic People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference, which took place at Rutgers Law School in Camden on February 12-14, 1998, poignantly captured the theme around which the conference was organized. The theme of the conference was Law and Literature: Examining the Limited Legal Imagination in the Traditional Legal Canon. True to the theme of the conference, many presenters sought to expand our collective imagination through poetry, fiction, and narrative. The presentations were intellectually stimulating and provocative. Indeed, there was a literary quality to some of the presentations. Perhaps most importantly, the conference itself, in the tradition of the Regional People of Color conferences, provided us with the necessary sustenance that can only be found in a community of scholars united by a particular undertaking. The dual focus of our undertaking is reflected in both the title of the conference and the papers included in this issue of the Journal. First, conference participants were concerned about the limited legal imagination reflected in the traditional legal canon. Of particular focus was the question of which voices, perspectives, and experiences have become central to the canon, and which are marginalized. Second, participants focused on law and literature, invoking literary fiction and poetry to explore the justice of legal rules and legal decisionmaking. Many scholars at the conference persuasively made the case that literature, and literary techniques (like narrative), can broaden the scope of legal discourse by bringing voices and perspectives which might otherwise go unrecognized, unheard, or unappreciated

The Mobility Case for Regionalism

In the discourse of local government law, the idea that a mobile populace can “vote with its feet” has long served as a justification for devolution and decentralization. Tracing to Charles Tiebout’s seminal work in public finance, the legal-structural prescription that follows is that a diversity of independent and empowered local governments can best satisfy the varied preferences of residents metaphorically shopping for bundles of public services, regulatory environment, and tax burden. This localist paradigm generally presumes that fragmented governments are competing for residents within a given metropolitan area. Contemporary patterns of mobility, however, call into question this foundational assumption. People today move between — and not just within — metropolitan regions, domestically and even internationally. This is particularly so for a subset of residents — high human-capital knowledge workers and the so-called “creative class” — that is prominently coveted in this interregional competition. These modern mobile residents tend to evaluate the policy bundles that drive their locational decisions on a regional scale, weighing the comparative merits of metropolitan areas against each other. And local governments are increasingly recognizing that they need to work together at a regional scale to compete for these residents.This Article argues that this intermetropolitan mobility provides a novel justification for regionalism that counterbalances the strong localist tendency of the traditional Tieboutian view of local governance. Contrary to the predominant assumption in the legal literature, competition for mobile residents is as much an argument for regionalism as it has been for devolution and decentralization. In an era of global cities vying for talent, the mobility case for regionalism has significant doctrinal consequences for debates in local government law and public finance, including the scope of local authority, the nature of regional equity, and the structure of metropolitan collaboration

The Mobility Case for Regionalism

In the discourse of local government law, the idea that a mobile populace can “vote with its feet” has long served as a justification for devolution and decentralization. Tracing to Charles Tiebout’s seminal work in public finance, the legal-structural prescription that follows is that a diversity of independent and empowered local governments can best satisfy the varied preferences of residents metaphorically shopping for bundles of public services, regulatory environment, and tax burden. This localist paradigm generally presumes that fragmented governments are competing for residents within a given metropolitan area. Contemporary patterns of mobility, however, call into question this foundational assumption. People today move between — and not just within — metropolitan regions, domestically and even internationally. This is particularly so for a subset of residents — high human-capital knowledge workers and the so-called “creative class” — that is prominently coveted in this interregional competition. These modern mobile residents tend to evaluate the policy bundles that drive their locational decisions on a regional scale, weighing the comparative merits of metropolitan areas against each other. And local governments are increasingly recognizing that they need to work together at a regional scale to compete for these residents.This Article argues that this intermetropolitan mobility provides a novel justification for regionalism that counterbalances the strong localist tendency of the traditional Tieboutian view of local governance. Contrary to the predominant assumption in the legal literature, competition for mobile residents is as much an argument for regionalism as it has been for devolution and decentralization. In an era of global cities vying for talent, the mobility case for regionalism has significant doctrinal consequences for debates in local government law and public finance, including the scope of local authority, the nature of regional equity, and the structure of metropolitan collaboration

Infrastructure Sharing in Cities

In this Essay, I reflect on the different ways in which cities engaged in what I call “infrastructure sharing” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cities around the world responded to the pandemic by repurposing their streets and sidewalks into outdoor seating, dining spaces, and car-free pedestrian corridors. At the same time, many cities and states also faced calls to “reclaim” underutilized public and private structures like empty houses and hotels and put them to a use responsive to the crisis. The Essay will highlight the difference between sharing property and assets that are part of the “public estate” and dedicated exclusively to public purposes, and sharing property and assets that cities hold in a more proprietary manner. The difference between these two kinds of public property carries implications for what kind of sharing of their infrastructure cities can do and the kinds of regulatory and policy mechanisms they might use to accomplish that sharing. While cities found creative ways to repurpose the public estate during the pandemic that may prove lasting, they have had a harder time reimagining the productive use of their more proprietary assets. That lack of imagination is problematic not just for creating more healthy and sustainable cities, but more particularly for addressing unequal access to infrastructure. Whether expanding or repurposing the public estate or acquiring and transferring underutilized land and structures, I argue that cities can provide new public goods and services to meet the different needs and exigencies of diverse communities through infrastructure sharing. However, sharing assets held or obtained in a city’s proprietary capacity with specific marginalized groups has more potential to facilitate the creation, or cocreation, of goods and services that directly address urban infrastructure inequity

City as an Ecological Space: Social Capital and Urban Land Use, The

One of the goals of land use (and pollution control) law is to force the internalization of these costs. This otherwise economic view of land use law is also rooted, however, in an ecological understanding of urban land use. Legal scholars writing over three decades ago successfully argued, based upon the ecological facts of life, that [p]roperty does not exist in isolation because the effects of its uses flow outside of the boundaries of ownership. The notion that property is inextricably part of a network of social and economic relationships, and that its impacts traverse legally defined boundaries and relationships, is now deeply enshrined in our regulation of public and private land. This Article highlights a category of social costs that remain largely exogenous to the norms underlying our system of land use controls. Scholars from various disciplines have long recognized the centrality of social capital to, and the resources it purchases for, the governance, health, and sustainability of urban communities. Legal scholars have yet to fully grapple with the costs imposed on the social networks and ties, or social fabric of a community, arising from land use and development decisions. This Article asks how, if at all, these costs are accounted for, or integrated into, land use regulation and policy. Social capital in this Article refers to the ways in which individuals and communities create trust, maintain social networks, and establish norms that enable participants to act cooperatively toward the pursuit of shared goals. The question that this Article asks is how, if at all, we account for a community\u27s social capital in land use law and policy. This inquiry is based on the assumption that decisions about physical urban form and design often, but not always, exist in a highly interactive (and integrated) relationship with the social structure and organization of urban communities. Part I of the Article employs a case study involving a lawsuit to stop the proposed sale of hundreds of community gardens by New York City, the owner of the previously vacant lots, to private developers. Part II takes a closer look at the legal mechanisms through which we regulate and manage land use in urban environments and through which the impacts on social capital can be assessed. Part III turns to contemporary urban land reform movements, namely New Urbanism and Smart Growth, which are reshaping the urban landscape in the pursuit of social, economic, and environmental quality goals. Part IV of this Article suggests that accounting for the integrated relationship between decisions about physical urban space and impacts on a community\u27s social capital necessarily requires rethinkinghow we manage and regulate the urban commons

Seeing Like a Chocolate City: Reimagining Detroit’s Future Through Its Past

This essay is part of an online symposium on Michelle Wilde Anderson\u27s “The Fight to Save the Town.” In it, Anderson captures how the rise and fall of Detroit maps onto so many other important cultural, political, social, and economic moments of the twentieth century. As Anderson rightly notes, many of the ways in which the city’s history is commonly told represent a “white gaze on Detroit.” What this narrative often leaves out is the critical role of the Black middle and professional class in stabilizing or holding up the city during the period often associated with the city’s decline. This Review focuses on the period roughly between 1970 and 2010. This period falls in between the well-documented “White Flight” out of the city on the heels of the 1967 riots and the less well-documented “Black Flight,” particularly of the Black middle and professional class, out of Detroit in the late twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first century.If we shift the gaze just a little to focus on what happened to the Black middle and professional class in Detroit over time, we might learn something about what held the city together for so many years—even after Whites fled to the suburbs. We would give a bit more agency to people who held the city up, culturally and economically, and who could be key to Detroit’s ability to set itself on a growth trajectory that is both prosperous and inclusive. We might imagine a future Detroit that reinvents itself through an investment in the communities and neighborhoods that helped to build and sustain cities like Detroit - so-called “chocolate cities” - in the past