Pretty ironic that the last post here was on Gaza. Given the current situation here, I'm taking a break from blogging. Praying for peace, David ..read more

Dotan Halevy recently published "Sand and the City: On Colonial Development and its Evasive Enemies in Twentieth-Century Palestine" in Environment and History. The abstract: This article traces the colonial origins of a crucial aspect of the environmentalist discourse since the mid-twentieth century - the idea that planetary substances should be stripped of ownership rights and become in and of themselves the subject of rights. The article looks closely at the Gaza region under British mandatory rule to explain how the rehabilitation of Gaza city, devastated during WWI, has failed. Gaza ..read more

The latest issue of Western Legal History is dedicated to the topic of "Water", and I plan to post on a number of the pieces in this issue.  I'll start with Joshua Getzler's masterful survey of water law in Britain and many of the territories it ruled at various points in history, "Ownership and Control of Fresh Water in Common Law Cultures". Getzler manages not only to integrate major developments in many legal systems - including those of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Mandate Palestine - and across nearly a millennium (beginning with Bracton), into a succinct ..read more

Owen Smitherman has posted "History, Public Rights, and Article III Standing", forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. The abstract: For decades, legal academics have complained about a conflict between history and the doctrine of Article III standing. First in Spokeo v. Robins (2016) and then notably in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez (2021), Justice Clarence Thomas presented a halfway resolution. Thomas grounded Article III standing in a historical distinction between private and public rights. Suits for violations of private rights would require no showing of concrete injur ..read more

Continuing themes from recent posts on British India and on nuisance: Sukriti Issar recently published "Nuisance, Planning and the Common Law in Late Eighteenth-Century Bombay" in The Journal of Legal History. The abstract: The literature on the legal transfer of English property law to colonial South Asia has long focused on the agrarian context. Urban property and the built environment remain understudied. This article explores how the common law of nuisance found its way into the workings of a Committee of Buildings in late eighteenth-century Bombay. An analysis of the internal files of th ..read more

Devika Shankar's article on property in water and fish in India is now also a blog post at Past & Present. Shankar explains that her article reflects  a close analysis of over 10 important and highly cited cases from different parts of British India in which judges deliberated on whether flowing water and fish could be treated as private property. Starting with a significant set of cases relating to the planting of stakes in the sea off the coast of Bombay, the article then primarily looks at cases involving rights over rivers in the fluid landscape of the Bengal delta. The article n ..read more

More on public nuisance: Maureen Brady recently posted "Cottages as Public Nuisances: The Long History of Land Use Regulation of the Poor", forthcoming in Depaul Law Review. The abstract: In the Fourth Book of his Commentaries on the Law of England, in a chapter entitled “Offenses Against the Public Health, and the Public Police or Oeconomy,” William Blackstone sited his discussion of “common nuisances.” Although many things on this list of what we now call public nuisances are familiar—blockages of public roads, disorderly saloons, trades emitting offensive smells or sounds—one stands out. B ..read more

Dan Farber at Legal Planet recently posted on "Cars, Smog, and EPA". An excerpt: For the first 20 years of federal regulation, Congress set the NOx [nitrogen oxides] standards for new cars itself. That’s quite different from the standards for industrial pollution sources, which Congress has always delegated to EPA. The reason may have been the high political stakes in the car industry or the relatively easier task of setting standards for new products in a single industry using a single energy process. East River and Manhattan Skyline in Heavy Smog (Chester Higgins, Jr., EPA, 1973 ..read more

Charles W. Sterling III recently published "Connections Between Present-Day Water Access and Historical Redlining" in Environmental Justice. The abstract: Although challenges in water and sanitation access are often assumed to be issues of low- and middle-income nations, more than 400,000 homes in the United States still lack access to complete indoor plumbing. Previous research has demonstrated that the remaining plumbing challenges are more prevalent in communities with high Black and Brown populations. This study hypothesizes that the 1930s practice of redlining by the Home Owners' Loan Co ..read more

The Grand Charter of the Escartons I was fortunate to be able to spend some time this summer along the Guisane River, in the area formerly known as the Dauphiné, today in southeastern France. The river is notable for its old canals, still in use, and the surrounding mountains are covered in thick forest. It turns out this landscape has an interesting legal history. In 1343, Humbert II, the last Dauphin of Viennois (before that title passed to the kings of France and was used for the heir apparents to the royal throne), confirmed the rights of the people of the Briançon region in ..read more