Real Estate & Property Law

Sunday Round-Up

By Robert Thomas (inversecondemnation.com)

Here's what we're reading today:

• From the Wall Street Journal "Of Blight and Men," a piece about settlement in the attempt to "redevelop" in Long Branch, NJ

• The Land Use Prof blog is back with a new cast of lawprof bloggers. Looking forward to their posts.

• The NY Times' review of The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution by Professor Barry Friedman.

• I finally had a chance to read the amici brief of constitutional law professors urging the Supreme Court to review the Seventh Circuit's decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago. In that case, the Seventh Circuit concluded that the Second Amendment's individual right to keep and bear arms is not incorporated against the states. The professors' brief does not focus on the merits vel non of gun control, but on the incorporation doctrine, and asks the Court to "clarify the reach of" the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) and its progeny, and hold the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights wholesale against the states. If accepted for review, McDonald could be the most significant Supreme Court decision in a generation. Best scholarly treatment of the subject is Professor Michael Kent Curtis's No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (1986).

Full post as published by inversecondemnation on September 27, 2009 (boomark / email).