Pass a Law, Any Law, Fast! State Legislative Responses to the Kelo Backlash
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Edward J. Lopez
In Kelo v. City of New London, the U.S. Supreme Court left it to the states to protect property against takings for economic development. Since Kelo, thirty-seven states have enacted legislation to update their eminent domain laws. This paper is the first to theoretically and empirically analyze the factors that influence whether, in what manner, and how quickly states change their laws through new legislation. Fourteen of the thirty-seven new laws offer only weak protections against development takings. The legislative response to Kelo was responsive to measures of the backlash but only in the binary decision whether to pass any new law. The decision to enact a meaningful restriction was more a function of relevant political economy measures. States with more economic freedom, greater value of new housing construction, and less racial and income inequality are more likely to have enacted stronger restrictions, and sooner. Of the thirteen states that have not updated, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mississippi are highly likely to do so in the future. Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York are unlikely to update at all.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Macroeconomic Instability and Corporate Failure: The Role of the Legal System
- Prevention of Crime and the Optimal Standard of Proof in Criminal Law
- Does a Rise in Maximal Fines Increase or Decrease the Optimal Level of Deterrence?
- Benchmarks and Economic Analysis
- Pass a Law, Any Law, Fast! State Legislative Responses to the Kelo Backlash
- The Problem of Shared Social Cost
- A Cost of Tax Planning
- Never Two Without Three: Commons, Anticommons and Semicommons
- Unavoidable Accident
- Protecting Private Property with Constitutional Judicial Review: A Social Welfare Approach
- Measuring Criminal Spillovers: Evidence from Three Strikes
- Corruption on the Court: The Causes and Social Consequences of Point-Shaving in NCAA Basketball
- Valuation of Quality of Life Losses Associated with Nonfatal Injury: Insights from Jury Verdict Data
- Belief in a Just World, Blaming the Victim, and Hate Crime Statutes
- Do Citizens Know Whether Their State Has Decriminalized Marijuana? Assessing the Perceptual Component of Deterrence Theory
- The Structure of Incremental Liability Rules
- Firms' Motivations for Environmental Overcompliance
- Contingent Fees, Signaling and Settlement Authority
- Rethinking the Economic Model of Deterrence: How Insights from Empirical Social Science Could Affect Policies Towards Crime and Punishment
- Crime, Business Conduct and Investment Decisions: Enterprise Survey Evidence from 34 Countries in Europe and Asia
- Additive and Non-Additive Risk Factors in Multiple Causation
- The Devil Made Me Do It: The Corporate Purchase of Insurance
- Factors Affecting the Length of Time a Jury Deliberates: Case Characteristics and Jury Composition
- Hybrid Licensing of Product Innovations
- The Effect of Endogenous Right-to-Work Laws on Business and Economic Conditions in the United States: A Multivariate Approach
- The Choice in the Lawmaking Process: Legal Transplants vs. Indigenous Law
- Building Encroachments
- Reporter's Privilege and Incentives to Leak
- Decision Analysis on Whether to Accept a Remittitur
- Deterrence in Rank-Order Tournaments
- Self-Defeating Subsidiarity
- Do Broader Eminent Domain Powers Increase Government Size?
