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Recent takings cases challenging inclusionary housing ordinances tap into an ongoing controversy about whether government interventions in the housing market do more harm than good; but they also raise much more general questions about takings law. This Article uses the controversy raised by recent housing cases to probe the relationship between the Supreme Court's regulatory takings jurisprudence and its exaction takings jurisprudence and to suggest a more coherent approach to implicit takings. The Court's exaction takings jurisprudence is well-designed if it is applied appropriately. As a general matter, it encourages the mitigation of socially harmful nuisances, incentivizes developers to make socially desirable decisions about how to develop their properties, and protects private property from overreaching administrators who might abuse their discretion to usurp surpluses from the owners' development projects. This Article offers guidelines for determining when the Court's exaction takings jurisprudence should apply. It also proposes that, in some circumstances, a property owner should be able to make an exaction takings claim and a regulatory takings claim. Finally, it offers a roadmap for analyzing implicit takings claims more coherently. Under that roadmap, whether inclusionary housing programs should be subjected to the nexus and rough proportionality tests depends upon how they are designed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The greatest challenge for any civilized society is to jind the appropriate balance of rights and responsibilities between the indiuidual and society. In the United States, the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of the line between indiuidual rights and gouernmental powers. The prerogatives and protections for private property rights help to define that line. The Supreme Court has deueloped two distinct bodies of constitutional jurisprudence bearing on the protections for priuate property, one under the doctrine of substantive dite process and the other under the Takings Clause. But the appropriate balance has been dijjicult to achieve, and the Supreme Court's jlfrisprudence has been prone to slippage. 7'lills, substantive due process has lost its teeth. Unless fundamental rights are implicated, modern substantive due process claims are so unlikely to succeed they are rarely worth making. Modern takings jurisprudence has not lost its teeth, but it has become incoherent and dysfunctional. The Supreme Colo t does not apply its takings jurisprudence consistently across different types of claims, and its expansive interiyretation of public uses has allowed government takings pozuers to be exploited by pozoerful political interests. Takings jurisprudence could be made more coherent and less dysfunctional by clarifying the nuisance rule, extending the public use requirement zo all takings, and ncinowing the interpretation of public uses. These refinements of takings Zaru would empower gmjernments to resolve nuisance conflicts, improue the coherence of the Court's jurisprudence aaoss different types of takings, constrain gouernments from using their regulatory and takings powers on behalf of special interests, and reduce the burden of government on private property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Property laws have far-reaching implications for the way people live and for the opportunities they and their children will have. They also have important consequences for property developers and businesses, both large and small. It is not surprising, therefore, that modern developments in property law have been so strongly influenced by political pressures. Unfortunately, those with the most economic resources and political power have had the most telling influences on the development of property laws in the United States during the twentieth century. This Article introduces a simple game--the "Not-In-My-Backyard Game"--to illustrate the motivations of various parties with interests in the direction of American property law. As the analysis indicates, affluent residents and owners of upscale businesses have incentives to pressure suburban governments for zoning regulations that effectively exclude less affluent residents from their neighborhoods. Affluent residents and corporations who want to relocate into urban neighborhoods have incentives to pressure city governments to use eminent domain to facilitate urban redevelopment projects, and the takings that ensue often effectively expel many less affluent residents and smaller businesses from their neighborhoods. The analysis accords with the historical evidence. In the early twentieth century, suburban governments began to use zoning ordinances to exclude poor and less affluent residents from suburban neighborhoods. Around the middle of the twentieth century, city governments began to use takings to effectively expel less affluent residents and smaller businesses from urban neighborhoods. The United States Supreme Court upheld the powers of local governments to exclude and expel, and state courts acquiesced to them. The consequences are high and rising land prices, unaffordable housing, homelessness, and the perpetuation of the de facto segregation of the American people by income, wealth, race, ethnicity, religion, and national origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations ("UN") Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Good ("CISG") offers the promise of harmonizing international sales law and facilitating international trade and global commerce. But there is a "homeward trend bias" that may encourage domestic courts to construe the gaps in the CISG broadly and fill them with non-uniform domestic legal rules. Questions about contract interpretation under the CISG raise the same concerns about a homeward trend bias as questions about the interpretation of express CISG provisions. The CISG has express provisions governing contract interpretation but their application may not provide an unambiguous interpretation. This presents two risks. One is that courts might reinterpret questions to be about the validity of contracts rather than their interpretation; in that case the CISG will not apply and courts will therefore apply domestic legal rules to answer the questions. The other possibility is that courts might rule that the interpretive questions are not governed by the CISG and might therefore use private choice of law rules to identify domestic legal rules to answer the questions. Neither of these possibilities should be welcomed. Courts that use non-uniform domestic laws to answer questions about the interpretation of CISG contracts will undermine the intent and purpose of the CISG no less than courts that answer other questions about matters that should be governed by the CISG using non-uniform domestic laws. All questions about contract interpretation under CISG contracts should therefore be governed either by the CISG's explicit provisions or by the CISG's general principles. This essay provides an analysis of the CISG's express contract interpretation provisions and illustrates how they can result in ambiguities. It argues that when there are ambiguities, the general principles on which the CISG is based imply that courts should interpret the contracts to promote reasonable commercial standards of fair dealing in the trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses liberty in relation to private law and the U.S. Constitution, and it mentions concerns regarding an American state's abuse of its power of coercion. Public law and human rights are addressed, along with the legal concepts of eminent domain, adverse possession, and freedom of contract. Private land-use restrictions and a parol evidence rule of law are examined, as well as U.S. law enforcement and contract-related unconscionability.

The article discusses the rise of corporation, the birth of public relations and the foundations of the political economy in the U.S. It provides an overview of the Second Industrial Revolution which is a period of growth and technological change in American business that shaped changes in the organization of business firms and markets. It provides an overview of the Progressive Movement which is a coordinated campaign for reform resulting from discontentment of economic and social changes.

This paper extends Farrell and Shapiro (1990) and Levin (1990) by providing necessary and sufficient conditions for horizontal mergers to be both profitable and welfare-enhancing when market demand and firms' costs are linear. We show that profitable, welfare-enhancing mergers are likely to involve firms whose combined pre-merger market shares exceed 50%, and that mergers may be profitable and welfare-enhancing even when they do not generate any direct cost efficiencies. Our results suggest that any approach to evaluating the welfare effects of horizontal mergers which does not account for industry-wide strategic effects is seriously flawed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the Supreme Court's recent narrowing of the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule in cases like herring v. United States and Davis v. United States, there is renewed interest in whether staff supreme courts will maintain or similarly narrow the search and seizure exclusionary rule for violations of their own state constitutions. The pattern of early adoptions of the exclusionary rule as a. matter of state law before it was mandated by the federal Constitution may provide interesting insights into how the state supreme courts will respond to cases such as herring and Davis. This article uses social-network theory to evaluate the patterns of communication and influence across state courts in the diffusion of the search and seizure exclusionary rule as a matter of state constitutional law. During the period studied, the Supreme Court made the exclusionary rule mandatory infederal criminal prosecutions for violations of the Fourth Amendment, but had not yet ruled that the Fourth Amendment applied to the states. We conceptualize the diffusion of the exclusionary rule in state courts as a matter of state law as a two-stage process. The first stage concerns whether the issue of exclusion of evidence obtained through illegal searches and seizures in violation of state constitutional law was presented to state supreme courts following adoption of the federal exclusionary rule in Weeks v. United States. The second stage concerns whether the state courts adopted the exclusionary rule as a matter of state law, before Wolf v. Colorado, when the Fourth Amendment was made applicable to the states. This article uses logistic regressions to evaluate the pattern of communication and influence among state courts in the diffusion of the exclusionary rule at each stage in the process. The results are striking. They suggest that precedents by other state supreme courts in the same West legal reporting regions were more influential in determining whether the question would arise in a particular state than precedents by state supreme courts in neighboring states, or the same federal circuit regions, or the same census regions. But precedents by other state supreme courts in the same federal circuit regions appear to have been more influential in determining whether the exclusionary rule would be adopted than precedents in neighboring states, the same West reporting regions, or the same census regions. These results both corroborate and extend those of previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]