Category Archives: Land use and Environment
Haley Todd Newsome, ‘Advancing Tort Law for Climate Displacement Compensation’
ABSTRACT Climate change has already displaced people from their homes and is predicted to displace millions more in the coming decades. Involuntary climate-induced migration causes loss and damage before, during, and after the displacement. In this Note, I argue that the climate displaced should seek tort compensation from fossil fuel companies for this loss and […]
Enriques, Romano and Tuch, ‘Green Gatekeepers’
ABSTRACT Products are routinely labeled ‘carbon neutral’, ‘recycled’, ‘biodegradable’, ‘ocean-friendly’, and ‘sustainable’. Bonds are marketed as ‘green’ and mutual funds as ‘ESG’, while firms may pledge to become ‘net zero’. But are statements concerning environmental qualities reliable? It is often hard for consumers and investors to tell. Environmental qualities tend to have credence attributes; they […]
Andrew Woodhouse, ‘Commodity-form theory of law, the climate crisis, and the European Union’
ABSTRACT This essay reflects on how the Marxist commodity-form theory of law can inform approaches to EU climate law. The commodity-form theory understands law as a central social relation in the capitalist mode of production. The essay combines this theory with a Marxist analysis of the relationship between capitalism and nature, arguing that the inherent […]
Christopher Boge, ‘The Concept of the Possession of the Land’
ABSTRACT Possession of land as a legal concept continues to confound, and perhaps it always will. On the one hand, it is a simple concept and primarily that is because it has a counterpart under a general conceptual scheme. It is the having of the land for oneself. On the other hand, it is misperceived […]
Lloyd Brown, ‘Trustee personal liability for contaminated land remediation: the UK position’
ABSTRACT Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 creates a liability risk for trusts and trustees. Trustees may indeed be found liable pursuant to Part IIA’s definition of an ‘owner’ of contaminated land. This definition includes trustees to avoid the situation of people evading liability by transferring affected land into trust funds. However, the […]
Noah Austin, ‘Resolving Land Use Conflicts Without Zoning’
ABSTRACT This Note presumes the rise of mixed-use development, upzoning, and other deregulatory zoning schemes. It sets aside the question of whether the costs of exclusionary zoning outweigh its benefits to society. And it characterizes the return-of-nuisance problem as something to be mitigated while pursuing land use deregulation, not as a cause for slowing that […]
Joseph Schremmer, ‘Subsurface Trespass in the Restatement (Fourth) of Property’
ABSTRACT Building on the scholarly work of leading property theorists Henry Smith and Thomas Merrill, the recently approved Fourth Tentative Draft of the Restatement (Fourth) of Property prescribes treating all entries below ground as ordinary trespasses. That includes entries in the shallow subsurface by tree roots, building foundations, and utility lines, as well as invasions […]
Just Published: Fraud and Risk, Carbon-Free Shipping, Green Shipping Contracts
Fraud and Risk in Commercial Law, edited by Paul S Davies and Hans Tjio, Hart Publishing, August 2024, 9781509970759. This book provides an analysis of key contemporary issues on the theme of fraud and risk in commercial law, including: technology and fraud, secondary liability and ‘failure to prevent’ economic crime, abuse of business entities, insolvency […]
Dimitrios Devetzis, ‘The Role of Private Law in Sustainable Development: Improving Sustainability through an Effective Anagnosis of US Contract Law’
ABSTRACT Sustainability is often seen as a problematic which does not involve social sciences and – mainly – the law, the role of which is many times limited to some restriction measures enacted through public law provisions, in order to set up the limits of non-environmental friendly practices and enact some prohibitions. Nevertheless, private law, […]
Nicholas Mouttotos, ‘The UNIDROIT Principles on International Commercial Contracts and sustainable development’
ABSTRACT A number of motivations currently drive multinational corporations to the inclusion, monitoring, and enforcement of contract requirements for sustainability. These can be either as a result of investor demand for environment, social, and governance policies; regulatory requirements for inclusion of such contract stipulations; or the increasing litigation for conduct leading to environmental harm, but […]