Land Use
Environmentalists Sue Over New Lake Tahoe Plan: Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good?
The Sierra Club and a local neighborhood group recently sued the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, challenging TRPA’s just-adopted Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin. That development strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive. Let me briefly explain why. The Lake Tahoe Basin, which straddles the California-Nevada border, has since 1968 been governed under a bistate Compact negotiated …
CONTINUE READINGDonald Rumsfeld’s Tips for Law Teachers
Today in Land Use class, I had an abysmal time attempting to teach Avco v. South Coast Regional Comm’n, a 1976 California Supreme Court case that is crucial in understanding the “vested rights” doctrine. Avco holds that a developer has vested rights to develop only when 1) it relies on a permit; and 2) has …
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CONTINUE READINGHas New Urbanism Killed Land Use Law?
My Land Use casebook, like most of them, mentions New Urbanist zoning and planning techniques, but does not dwell on them. In order to teach New Urbanist concepts such as Form-Based Codes, SmartCode, and the Transect, I had to develop my own materials, as well as shamelessly stealing a couple of Powerpoint presentations from a friend who …
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CONTINUE READINGLiterally Trashing the Environment
No, not another rap on Joe Biden. The world literally wastes an awful lot of food, notes the International Herald Tribune: Between 1.2 billion and 2 billion tons of the 4 billion tons of food produced around the world every year never gets eaten, according to a new survey by a group of British engineers. …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Law and Policy Events for Couch Potatoes
UC Berkeley and UCLA School of Law’s joint Climate Change and Business Research Initiative has produced a number of public events featuring experts on pressing environmental law and policy issues. We now have on-line video recordings of many of them, for those of you who prefer not to leave the comfort of your home or …
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CONTINUE READINGNapoleon Bonaparte, Zoning Administrator
This semester, I am teaching Land Use, and in the casebook I came across this evocative and meaningful quote from Tony Arnold: The real law of land use regulation exists mostly in zoning codes and regulatory procedures, as well as in the actions or decisions of local land use regulatory bodies. Consider all the zoning, …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Case Against CEQA “Reform” — San Diego’s Lame Transportation Plan
The movement to “reform” the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a citizen-enforced law that requires public agencies to analyze environmental impacts of significant proposed projects, is gaining strength in 2013. Everyone from the Governor to the Senate President to business groups to public agencies are joining forces, singing the same anti-CEQA song. Their evidence that …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Mystery of Koontz: “Why Are We Here?”
Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog reports that the plaintiff’s argument in the Court’s highest-profile Takings case of the year, Koontz v. St. John’s River Water Management District, did not go well. Both Rick and I have blogged about the case before, and the more I think about it, it seems to me that the case has been …
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CONTINUE READINGPreviewing This Week’s Oral Arguments in the Supreme Court’s Most Important Property Rights Case This Term
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in what is shaping up as the Court’s most important property rights case of the current Term: Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, No. 11-1447. What can we expect? Koontz is one of three Takings Clause cases on the Court’s docket this Term. …
CONTINUE READINGThe Trouble with TDRs
What went wrong with TDRs? But first, you might ask, what are TDRs? TDRs — more formally, transferable development rights — were the first form of environmental trading system to be used in the United States. For instance, the Supreme Court decided a the Penn Central case, which involved TDRs over a decade before Congress created the …
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