116 Yale L.J. 1400 (2007)

The idea that a tort can be split analytically into two parts—risk and harm—underlies a great deal of torts scholarship. Yet the notion has been all but ignored by property scholars employing Calabresi and Melamed’s famous entitlement framework. Thus, in discussing an “entitlement to pollute,” scholars rarely distinguish inputs to pollution (a factory’s emission of fumes from a smokestack) from outcomes of pollution (a neighbor’s grimy linens or respiratory distress). Instead, “pollution” is viewed as a single unified event that one party or the other receives an entitlement to control. This failure to conceptually separate risky inputs from harmful outcomes has led to imprecise and inaccurate ways of thinking and talking about entitlements. Property theory has suffered as a result, as has our understanding of how property and torts relate to each other. In this Article, I make a start at bringing the concept of the divided tort—here termed “half-torts”—into the property picture. Doing so generates a reformulated entitlement framework that fits more comfortably with moral intuitions, highlights the potential roles of luck and self-help in producing outcomes, and clarifies the available menu of alternatives for addressing property conflicts. The approach taken here advances a functional view of property as a container designed to collect inputs and outcomes with some regularity.

116 Yale L.J. 1518 (2007)

The partial regulatory takings movement seeks to compensate private landowners when regulations diminish their land values. This movement has grown in recent years, particularly at the state level. Scholars have focused thus far on the cost of compensation and its effect on the regulations that governments enact or enforce. In addition to exploring those concerns, this Note argues that partial regulatory takings regimes threaten to constrain residents’ ability to influence their communities’ growth and character. The greatest impact could fall on low-income communities, many of which contain disproportionate levels of undesirable land uses and lack adequate financial resources to influence land use planning in the absence of regulatory solutions or alternative venues. To address these problems, state and local governments should implement what I call a “regulatory balances” regime, strengthening participatory planning venues and funding the resulting measures.