Jessica A Shoemaker, ‘Re-Placing Property’, 94 University of Chicago Law Review (forthcoming, 2024), available at SSRN (31 August 2023). In ‘Re-Placing Property’, Jessica A Shoemaker demonstrates the extent to which our legal rules about property have allowed real property ownership to become, in many cases, paradoxically completely divorced from place attachment. Drawing from disciplines such as geography and sociology, Shoemaker defines ‘place attachment’ as ‘a “sense of belonging, loyalty, or affection that a person feels for one or more places”’ (p 15, quoting A Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford 2013)). With real property increasingly owned by people who have little or no connection to the land itself, including absentee heirs and distant investors who often simply own shares of property through an investment fund, local communities bear the costs of these absentee owners’ choices. Consequently, early American ideals that, at least in theory, favored egalitarian access to ownership and that ‘reward[ed] productive improvement and agrarian stewardship’ (p 4), are now being trampled to accommodate elitist ownership patterns that in some ways mirror feudalism (pp 20, 60) … (more)
[Ann E Tweedy, JOTWELL, 13 December 2023]
Leave a Reply