Laying the Foundation: The Private Rental Market and Affordable Housing

The private rental housing market plays a critical, and often overlooked, role in shaping the lives of the poor and the surrounding community. This brief Article presents Matthew Desmond’s rich portrayal of low-income tenants and their landlords in his groundbreaking new book, Evicted, which shows how poor housing conditions and cycles of eviction impact poor families. The Article, which also draws upon Courtney Anderson’s work connecting housing instability with problematic student turnover at an elementary school, highlights the importance of story-telling. Without some sort of subsidy to cover the gap between the ability of the poor to pay for housing and the costs of construction and maintenance, the private market cannot supply additional affordable housing. Arguably, in such a reality, it is imperative that scholars make the choice Desmond made: to deliberately de-emphasize empirical studies and instead rely on stories to put human faces on the suffering connected to the existing structure of lowincome private rental housing

On Becoming ‘Professor’: A Semi-Serious Look in the Mirror

The author offers a brief parody article about law reviews, socio-economic class, cheese, and the legal professoriate

Offsetting and the Consumption of Social Responsibility

This Article examines the relationship between individual consumption and consumption-based harms by focusing on the rise in consumption offsetting. Carbon offsets are but the leading edge of a rise in consumer options for offsetting externalities associated with consumption. Moving from examples of quasi offsetting to environmental offsetting and the possibility of poverty offset institutions, I argue that offsetting provides a valuable mechanism for individuals to correct for the harms associated with consumption. This Article makes two major contributions to how we understand the relationship between consumption and social responsibility. First, it identifies an emerging offsetting phenomenon in seemingly discrete market practices and gives suggestions for improving upon them. Second, it suggests that by taking seriously both consumption and externalities, progress can be made on everything from the environment to global poverty. Offsetting, while not getting at all moral or societal obligations, does root such obligations in the shared activity, and perhaps belief, of Americans: consumption

Natural Law, Assumptions, and Humility

This review of Natural Property Rights celebrates Eric Claeys’s efforts to resuscitate natural law as a viable approach to property law. Although readers unlikely to be convinced that natural law is the way to best understand property rights, Claeys succeeds in breathing new life into natural law. Natural Property Rights’ emphasis on use as property law’s fundamental value creates space to reconceptualize the rights of property owners and the place of non-owners within a just theory of property rights. The main critiques of Natural Property Rights offered in this review center around the choice to prioritize rights over duties and the logically inconsistencies involved in Claeys’s attempts to defend the justice of non-Indian claims to land that had belonged to Indian nations

Property, Race, Segregation, and the State Property

Property scholars have neither forgotten nor ignored the government\u27s role in creating and furthering racial segregation. Scholars have written extensive work on redlining, racially restrictive covenants, the siting of public housing in minority poor communities and the resistance of wealthier white towns to affordable housing. Nevertheless, Richard Rothstein\u27s book, The Color of Law, should be required reading for property scholars and students. Beautifully written, the book is packed with new details and stories that illustrate the many ways government-at the local, state, and federal levels-denied African-Americans equal access to space and property

Creating Space for Reservation Growth

This brief article is a review of Robert J. Miller, Reservation Capitalism : Economic Development in Indian Country (2012). It highlights some of the significant points Miller makes in his book and concludes that the book is a must read for those interested in reservation economic development

Reclaiming Demographics: Women, Poverty, and the Common Interest in Particular Struggles

Invited Symposium Introduction for Jan. 2012 AALS Poverty Section Panel

White Parents Searching for White Public Schools

The New White Flight makes two significant contributions to our understanding of race and education. First, it argues that white parents chose to send their children to segregated, disproportionately white schools. This choice is reflected in white residential preferences for areas where pricing-out mechanisms ensure that the local school is disproportionately white. (P. 254.) This racially-motivated choice holds even when school quality is controlled for, meaning that whites tend to choose predominately white schools even when presented with the choice of a more integrated school that is of good academic quality. (P. 236.) Second, it shows how charter schools give white parents a way to act on their preference for majority white schools even within school districts where only minority of students are white. Charter schools and other school choice programs, by enabling white parents to act on their general preference to avoid schools that are predominantly Black or Latino, facilitate the creation and maintenance of white charter school enclaves within larger diverse school districts. (P. 262.

The Dream of Property Professors

Michael Heller and James Salzman\u27s new book, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, is a dream come true for property professors. I suspect that many of us have moments when we think to ourselves, wow, this stuff is really interesting, imagining that property law could somehow be of general interest. Too often that dream is killed when the eyes of non-lawyers, including family members, start to glaze over when they hear words like rule against perpetuities or trademark. Heller and Salzman have succeeded in making the stories property professors tell the stuff of a bestseller. They retell many of the standard classroom or analytical stories in a way that is both interesting to the general public and somehow worthy of broad discussion