By Marc L. Roark+ In 1996, five buildings on 13th Street in the Lower East Side of New York City were transferred to a housing developer to gut, refurbish, and transform into low-income housing. In the years preceding that, squatters and the city engaged in on-again, off-again claims for the space that weaved careful narratives of ownership, community redevelopment, and social obligation against other narratives of sweat equity, legitimacy, and utility. None of these narratives were necessarily neat and tidy — they were overlapping and conflicting and demonstrated the way that squatters on the Lower Eastside of New York City…
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Our most recent scholarship, Volume 47.3, discusses the Supreme Court’s decision in Knick v. Township of Scott and its impact on takings jurisprudence and the role of Stare Decisis. Recently, two of our outstanding authors, Robert Thomas and Ilya Somin, blogged further insights about the case, Fordham Urban Law Journal’s symposium, and the publication process they experienced. We thank Robert and Ilya for their kind words. We also thank all of our authors for their dedication to legal scholarship and their continued, tireless commitment to urban justice, even during these difficult times. Check out full versions of Robert Thomas’s Blog…
Panelists (from left): Nestor Davidson, Constantine E. Kontokosta, Arnaud Sahuget, Dan Wu, and Geeta Tewari. This is Part 1 of our 2019 Cooper-Walsh Colloquium Round-up. The 2019 Cooper-Walsh Colloquium, Urban Intelligence and the Emerging City, took place on Friday, October 25th, 2019. Fordham Urban Law Journal’s City Square team will briefly summarize each panel and then highlight a relevant topic discussed at each panel. Panel 1: The Evolution of Urban Intelligence The first panel of the Cooper-Walsh Colloquium held by Fordham’s Urban Law Journal centered around the evolution of urban intelligence. A riveting conversation on urban intelligence and smart cities…
By Kelly O’Connor New York City residents use an estimated ten billion plastic shopping bags annually, resulting in 1,700 tons of residential garbage per week.[i] Despite the fact that city government has long recognized the great environmental and financial costs of single-use plastic bags, local proposals to reduce the number of carryout bags in the territory have been met with vehement resistance for over a decade.[ii] In 2016, the New York City Council narrowly passed a bill that would impose a five-cent fee on plastic and paper carryout bags from grocery, convenience, and retail stores, designed to incentivize consumers to…
By Sacha Urbach For progressives living in New York, the 2018 primaries felt like a long overdue bright spot during a time of uncertainty and unrest. Letitia James became the first African-American woman to receive the Democratic nomination for New York State Attorney General, a position that Eric Schneiderman relinquished after revelations of a pattern of sexual violence. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the political world when she defeated incumbent Joe Crowley and pulled off the biggest upset of the 2018 primaries. Of course, underlying all of this was the importance of this year’s primaries as the first step in a larger…
In October 2016 member states of the United Nations agreed on the New Urban Agenda. A core philosophical component of this agenda was the right to the city. This is a paradigm which provides an alternative framework to re-think urbanization along a more user-generated trajectory.
By Eric J. Miller* The development of the institutional approach to policing, and procedure more generally, is one of the most exciting features of criminal procedure over the past decade. More accurately, there are a series of institutional approaches—doctrinal, philosophical, sociological, empirical—that all claim that there is independent value in regulating the police, separate from the additional value of protecting suspects’ rights.
Yxta Maya Murray Yxta Maya Murray is a professor at Loyola Law School. She has authored six novels, and also serves as a contributing editor for Artillery Magazine, an arts publication based in Los Angeles. On Saturday, August 13, 2016, from dawn to dusk, performance artist Rafa Esparza carved weapons out of dead trees in a small clearing of Los Angeles’s Elysian Park. His piece, commissioned by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles for its Made in L.A. biennial exhibition,[1] was titled RED SUMMER, freedom is an endless meeting. And I don’t miss your heat. But here we are again (“Red Summer”).[2] Red Summer memorializes the…
By Justin Nix* American policing is currently in the midst of a legitimacy crisis, fueled primarily by numerous highly publicized fatal shootings of black citizens over the last two and a half years.[1] Arguably the most consequential was the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. This incident sparked protests throughout the United States and fueled the growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement and Campaign Zero, which have helped raise awareness about police use of force.[2] Since Ferguson, many claims have been made about crime, policing in general, and police use of force – particularly against minorities. I outline…
Each year, the Urban Law Journal holds the Jason Libou Online Writing Competition, which considers student-written work on topics in urban planning, education, urban criminal justice, and energy and sustainability. Samantha Frankel’s piece on the growing problem of homelessness in U.S. cities, this year’s winning submission, explores the ways in which urban governments, rather than addressing the causes of homelessness, have enacted anti-homeless laws that serve to exacerbate the problem.