When it comes to urban planning, to what extent and under what conditions should the community’s interest prevail over the rights of private property owners? Public Interest, Private Property addresses this question at a time when pollution, urban sprawl, and condo booms are forcing municipal governments to adopt prescriptive laws and regulations. Case studies focus on spheres in which public values and private property rights collide – expropriation law, natural resources regulation, green development, and water provision – laying the groundwork for more active debates on the issues currently shaping our cities.

A new approach to developing and applying technology in the public interest.

This casebook surveys the law of both personal and real property from the perspective of public and private rights and restrictions on things and land. After establishing a framework within which to define property, the text covers not only traditional topics like conveyancing, estates and future interests, leaseholds and inherent and public limitations on use, but also the applicability of such limitations in modern contexts such as intellectual property, housing discrimination, public lands and environmental protection, with brief nods to emerging areas like hydraulic fracturing and GMO regulation.

This casebook surveys the law of both personal and real property from the perspective of public and private rights and restrictions on things and land. After establishing a framework within which to define property, the text covers not only traditional topics like conveyancing, estates and future interests, leaseholds and inherent and public limitations on use, but also the applicability of such limitations in modern contexts such as intellectual property, housing discrimination, public lands and environmental protection, with brief nods to emerging areas like hydraulic fracturing and GMO regulation.

This book examines the almost entirely neglected realm of public property, identifying and describing a number of key organizing principles around which a nascent jurisprudence of public property may be developed. In property law terms, the public realm is lost to plain view. Despite the vast acreage of public lands, or the extensive tracts of private lands over which public rights subsist, there is little commensurate scholarly discussion of the ideas, theories, practices, and laws of public property. This is no accident. Public property has been marginalized and pushed to the periphery for centuries, a consequence of the dominant discourse of private property, and its enclosing, encroaching tendencies. This book explores the rich diversity of the public estate, of what the public realm means for us, the general public, canvassing what we may ‘own’, where we may ‘belong’, or not, and how we may ‘connect’ through a shared use and enjoyment of public place and space. To better understand public property is to better value its critical public-wealth. Whether overlooked, over-used, or under threat of imminent loss, this book maintains that our loved (and not so loved) public spaces are essential components of our diverse, functioning, and optimistically livable human geographies. As such, they demand legal protection. This important and original book will be of considerable interest to scholars and others with interests in property and land law, socio-legal studies, legal geography and urban studies.