Government’s right to compel private owners to sell land for public works makes it easier for the government to build things like roads. A single hold-out owner along the route’s most logical path could otherwise hold the government to ransom. But things get murkier when government uses its power of expropriation for private profit.
Ilya Somin takes on the use of eminent domain by American urban development authorities. Many U.S. states now restrict local governments against using public takings for private development, due in part to voter backlash against prominent abuses of eminent domain.
New Zealand’s local governments have started thinking about urban development authorities as vehicles for redevelopment. But there are important lessons to be learned from America’s experience.
Please join us for a workshop with America’s leading authority on the use of eminent domain by local authorities. Professor Somin will provide key lessons from the American experience to inform New Zealand practice.
About the Speaker
Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, and the study of popular political participation and its implications for constitutional democracy. He is the author of The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), co-editor of Eminent Domain in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), among several other books.
Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. He features regularly, either in the opinion pages or quoted as expert, in American media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post, and from the New York Times to Al Jazeera. He has testified before US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights and the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, affiliated with the Washington Post. From 2006 to 2013, he served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, one of the country’s top-rated law and economics journals.
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