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Pacific Legal Foundation Symposium on the 100th Anniversary of Euclid v. Ambler Realty
The symposium is seeking submissions.

Next year is the 100th anniversary of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, the Supreme Court decision upholding exclusionary zoning. I think Euclid is one of the worst supreme Court decisions ever, and exclusionary zoning - and the resulting massive housing shortage of which it is the biggest cause - is the biggest property rights issue of our time. In a recent article, In a recent Texas Law Review article, Josh Braver and i argue that exclusionary zoning violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and outline ways in which a combination of litigation and political action can be used to combat them. See also our much shorter non-academic article in the Atlantic.
Even many who don't agree with that position can recognize now is a good time to reconsider Euclid and its legacy. Thus, I am happy to announce that the Pacific Legal Foundation - a major public interest law firm specializing in property rights issues - is sponsoring a symposium on the 100th anniversary of Euclid, and soliciting proposals. They are organizing it together with the Mercatus Center and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy. Here is the announcement:
Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., where the Court approved of municipalities' use of their "police powers" to enact zoning ordinances excluding lawful activities from certain districts and segregating residential housing based on the housing's effects on neighboring properties. The effects of Euclid have been pervasive, since virtually all American cities and towns divide themselves into land-use districts through these public-welfare zoning ordinances.
In Euclid, land that an owner had intended to sell for industrial purposes was rezoned for residential use by a Cleveland suburb, resulting in an alleged decrease in land value of approximately 75 percent. The Court's decision provided an unqualified endorsement of the practice of land-use regulation under the government's police powers using a creative application of nuisance principles. The Court noted that "a nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard," and, going beyond the facts of the case, singled-out apartment buildings as "parasites" amidst neighborhoods of "private" family homes.
For the past 100 years, scholars have debated Euclid's effect on housing in America and the resulting tension between states' police power protection of public welfare and constitutional property rights, due process, and equal protection. The approaching 100th anniversary of the Court's decision presents a new opportunity to take a fresh look at the decision, its significance, and legacy, and particularly what a new American land-use and zoning paradigm might look like for the next 100 years.
It's also a fitting time to assess the economic impact of zoning, how state and federal environmental regulations have contributed to driving up the costs of building, and what the future may hold for land-use regulation. Pacific Legal Foundation, the Mercatus Center, and the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy seek papers from a variety of disciplines building on the past 100 years of research and commentary to re-evaluate the foundations of American zoning and look toward the future.
Some additional details:
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Authors of accepted papers will receive a $4,000 honorarium.
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Papers will be presented at a symposium at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School in early 2026.
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Cost of hotel accommodation and reasonable travel expenses to the symposium will be covered.
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Papers will be published in the Spring 2026 issue of the Journal of Law, Economics & Policy.
Instructions on how to submit are available here. The submission deadline is August 15.
Here is the organizers' list of suggested topics:
POSSIBLE TOPICS
The following are possible topics of potential research papers and are not intended to be an exclusive or exhaustive list.
How should Euclid be interpreted and what is its legacy in light of the pervasive racially-discriminatory use of zoning over the decades after Euclid?
Did the Supreme Court expand state police powers in Euclid beyond their constitutional limit? If Euclid were to be reexamined today, would the Court's former holding stand up to review under the Court's reinvigorated history-and-tradition analysis?
Writers from the 1920s optimistically imagined that zoning as it was initially conceived might suffice to carry American cities forward for 100 years. Looking past Euclid and thinking broadly, what might a new land-use paradigm for American cities look like for the next century?
What has been Euclid's relationship with or contribution to America's housing crisis and how could its effects be remediated?
Should Euclid, which had been initially interpreted narrowly by some state courts, have been construed differently in light of the subsequent Nectow v. City of Cambridge case and later land-use jurisprudence?
What should be the future of Euclid on federal and state regulatory takings jurisprudence, given the arguments presented in articles like, "The Constitutional Case Against Exclusionary Zoning" by Ilya Somin and Joshua Braver?
What legislative options for zoning reform could supersede the holding in Euclid, particularly in light of bills introduced and/or passed at the state and federal levels in recent years?
Considering examples from other countries with different zoning systems, as discussed in Sonia Hirt's book, Zoned in the USA, should the United States consider a more limited form of zoning, and what might that look like?
Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the zoning enabling acts, which largely derived from the federal Standard State Zoning Enabling Act. What is the current status of these acts, the substance of which predates the Euclid decision, and what are some potential reforms and/or alternatives.
Since this is a PLF event, I must make the standard disclaimer that my wife is a PLF employee. However, she is not involved in the organization of this symposium, nor in the evaluation of paper proposals. Nor am I! So don't send your proposals to me (or her). Send them to Stephen Davis of PLF and Andrew Cannon (JLEP), as instructed at the website linked above.
I suppose I should also add that it was not my idea to make the issues raised in my article with Josh Braver one of the possible suggested paper topics. I didn't even know about this symposium until PLF announced it, and asked me to help promote (which I am happy to do). Conspiracy theorists won't believe it (though Volokh Conspiracy theorists might!), but it's true.
Regardless, this is a hugely important set of issues, and I hope and expect the symposium will be a success.
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I would love to get off the lawyer thing and hear what Jane Jacobs would say. Law is after the fact
This article reviews the implications for land use policy of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Urban Revitalization and Eminent Domain: Misinterpreting Jane Jacobs
February 2011
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228125245_Urban_Revitalization_and_Eminent_Domain_Misinterpreting_Jane_Jacobs
HERE YOU GO:
" judicial unwillingness to provide meaningful scrutiny to condemnation for private redevelopment is based, in part, on acceptance of the revisionist, and incorrect, reading of Jacobs’ work."
I tell the LOGIC students in Philosophy , Logic (and hence law) is only the validity of the argument. YOU NEED FIRST THE FACTS
[ of course for all you Bernard Lonergan and Michael Polanyi fans, yes, there are no raw facts ther are all interpreted, still you get what I mean ]
A compromise position: Changes to zoning can constitute takings, but the taking doesn't transfer to subsequent owners.
So, when the initial zoning is imposed, and the original owner has lost 70% of the value of the land, THEY have been subject to a taking. But when they sell it, the new owner has only bought the remaining 30% of the value, and sustaining the zoning isn't a taking.
This is, after all, how things operate for more conventional takings: If a local government takes an easement on your property, you have been subject to a taking, but the next owners buys the property as is, and hasn't.
Even then you run into the problem of speculative damages. To me, the only time when there is an even arguable takings claim is when zoning laws are changed in response to an actual or publicly announced use -- if I buy property in an unzoned but residential neighborhood, announce I am setting up a tannery, and the town rezones that area to exclude my use, I arguable have a claim for a taking. The damages should be the premium I paid for the property (if anything) over its residential value -- I should not get paid based on the hypothetical value of my unbuilt tannery.
Nah. Back when I lived out in the country, about 3 acres of my land were on the other side of a river, I visited it once in 20 years. And yet, if the state had taken that property, it would have been a real taking despite the inarguable fact that I never once used it. Why not here?
Well, it's hard to compute, that's true. It is admittedly easier to compute when zoning is changed to exclude a use already in the planning stages, and dead simple when the zoning change prohibits the CURRENT use, as with a street nearby: Some years ago the local government rezoned it from mixed use to pure commercial, and the homes there have been falling into ruin as the existing grandfathered owners die or have to move, because nobody will buy the land encumbered with a house that would just have to be torn down.
Very convenient that the local government has plans to widen that road, and will be able to buy the property very cheaply when they get around to it.
No, exclusionary zoning is not the biggest cause of the massive housing shortage, or a cause at all. As Somin notes, we have had zoning laws for a century.
The biggest cause if the large-scale importation of foreigners, beyond what our infrastructure supports. Somin this importation.
Somin is a Marxist trying to destroy American society. He wants to take away American rights and force Americans to live in overcrowd living conditions.
A major secondary factor is that, after the 2008 mortgage crisis, people walked away from a lot of homes that were no longer remotely worth what they were mortgaged for, for a variety of reasons. But the banks did not price them to sell, because doing so would have resulted in them ending up undercapitalized, they'd have been legally forced to shut down if they'd put market valuations on those properties.
So the houses stood empty for years, and as empty houses do, fell into ruin. Resulting in a substantial reduction in US housing stock relative to population, and in some places, an absolute reduction in housing stock.
Yeah, the Marxist fighting government power. Stop beclowning yourself.
No, he wants to give the government power to flood your neighborhood with foreigners.
He’s against the government having the power to prevent that, that’s not the same thing, slaver.
He wants one branch of the govt to stop another branch of the govt from protecting our freedoms.
First, nobody was imported. Second, we're back to Schroedinger's immigrants, people who do not work and who take our jobs, depending on the needs of the nativist's argument. Here, we have the same immigrants who undercut American workers by doing low wage work somehow also outbidding Americans for housing.
One no more has a right to use ones property for any purpose one wants than to use ones body for any purpose one wants.
Ok, but X≤Y doesn't prove anything about the value of X if you don't know the value of Y. Many people would argue that you DO have the right to use your own body for any purpose you want, after all.
Agreed, but opposite of the way you mean it.
One of my difficulties with Professor Somin’s whole approach is that to be able to have a healthy society, we ought to be able to be grown-up enough to say that we tried something and after a certain amount of time with it, we found it just didn’t work the way we expected or new circumstances have come up requiring revisiting it, without a whole bunch of blaming and shaming and accusations and guilt trips on the people who came up with the idea, and without turning everything into matters of constitutional rights.
In both respects, both by creating an expectation that whenever we have a problem, somebody has to be blamed and vilified, and by turning all policy questions into questions of individual rights with no consideration for the public good, I think the whole business of constitutionalizing and making big dramas out of ordinary policy differences that ought to be resolved peacefully by neighbors really harms the fabric of our society.
In our constitutional system, the state - not the federal government and not the locality - is the basic political unit for most decisions. The state is big enough to have power to intervene when localities elevate their residents’ interests too far above everybody else, while being small and varied enough not to lock the whole country into a single one-size-fits-all solution.
Professor Somin should be going to state legislatures and asking them to intervene to protect the interests of non-residents by overriding local zoning laws that overinflate existing homeowners’ housing values at the expense of making housing, and life, excessively hard for everybody else. He should be making a political case for doing this. An increasing number of politicians and state legislatures are paying attention.
The constitution, however, has nothing to do with any of this. Nor do I recommend making a political case based on vilifying people. Why not a simple adult-to-adult approach? Something like “this approach isn’t working for us. If we want a society with economic and social mobility, we need to try something different.”
"Professor Somin should be going to state legislatures and asking them to intervene"
The problem is somewhat similar to his positions on immigration: His views simply aren't that popular, so he can ask all he wants, he's not going to get.
His ideas have made headway recently in several states, including conservative Montana and liberal California. They’ve also gotten some traction in a few localities like New York City. And there’s now a YIMBY caucus in Congress.
Headway has consisted of somewhat relaxing zoning restrictions on housing, not abolishing them or altering them as radically as Professor Somin would like. But still, progress is progress.
Yeah, I'm not saying that something marginally closer to his views couldn't be popular. Obviously there are zoning abuses, and building codes routinely are gamed to raise property tax revenues by preventing affordable housing from being built.
But he has kind of a laser like focus on 'fixing' these problems by doing things that would actually be unpopular, like permitting multi-family housing in established single family neighborhoods. Rather than just reforming zoning and building codes in a more moderate and popular way.
It's like the way he doesn't want to make our immigration laws more rational, he just wants rid of them.
I can't see any legal connection to 'popularity' if you are not going to put those ideas up to referendum or ballot. So where I live the longtime HOA is now dead. Not enough people care to revive it in any form. What a surprise to some that teens are acting up because they can't use the swimming pool in the summer....several homes up for sale and found out the other day that since realtors have to disclose the death of the HOA , it knocked $30 000 off a couples modest asking price for their small home.
Popularity follows education. Do they know Economics ? Do they have kids (parents with teens are hip to the bad news of the closing of the swimming pool)
Why have laws at all ? The lawyer told my spouse that every relevant law is covered by municipal, county or state law already and on that front the HOA has been outdated for a while.
Let's have some subsidiarity here !!! Why should Gov Newsom say ANYTHING about my neighborhood ??? GET RID OF THE LAWS ....or....MAKE THEM AT THE LOWEST LEVEL
The connection between popularity and legality is perverse: Because his policy preferences are unpopular, he is trapped into either giving up on them, or claiming that they're constitutionally mandated, so judges are obligated to impose them on the nation whether or not they're unpopular.
So he's continually making constitutional arguments that are way out there in the hope that they'll be popular with the only group he thinks matter in the end: Judges.
"I think Euclid is one of the worst supreme Court decisions ever . . . "
That is what you say about every border decision when Trump is in office.
Which is it?
That "Read More" posting option mocks your ego, doesn't it?