Real Estate & Property Law

Professor Van Dyke's Who Owns The Crown Lands Of Hawaii - Book Review By Paul Sullivan, Esq.

By Robert Thomas (inversecondemnation.com)

Attorney Paul M. Sullivan, currently a lawyer for the U.S. Navy but formerly an adjunct professor at the U. Hawaii Law School and a member of the Hawaii State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, has reviewed U.H. lawprof Jon Van Dyke's book, Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawaii (U.H. Press 2008) (available from Amazon here). 

In A Very Durable Myth: A Critical Commentary on Jon Van Dyke's Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawaii?, 31 U. Haw. L. Rev. 341 (2009), Sullivan writes:

The title question of Professor Jon Van Dyke's recent book Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawaii does not require a book to answer.  The answer is simple and not seriously contested, even in Professor Van Dyke's book. Some of the Crown Lands with which the book is concerned are owned by the United States Government, and the rest are owned by the State of Hawaii. They are former lands of the Hawaiian monarchy -- about 940,000 acres in extent or about one-quarter of the lands within the state's boundaries -- ceded to the United States at annexation in 1898 and in part further transferred to the State of Hawaii at statehood in 1959.

Instead of answering its title question, Professor Van Dyke's book offers passionate advocacy for its answer to a different question: Who should own Hawaii's Crown Lands?  Even for this question, however, a book is not needed to state or explain Professor Van Dyke's proposed answer. The book's concise thesis is that the Crown Lands should not be owned by the federal or state government, but instead should be placed in the hands of a Native Hawaiian nation or government (presumably by the state and federal owners and without compensation to either government) for the use and benefit of "the Native Hawaiian people." 

Id. at 341-43 (footnotes omitted).  Both Sullivan's review (available here) and Professor Van Dyke's book are worth a read.  More about the ceded lands and the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in the case here.

Full post as published by inversecondemnation on April 12, 2009 (boomark / email).