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Abstract:
Aware that law and social norms are complexly intertwined, legal scholars have begun to peek inside the black box of cultural change. Methodological individualists see a social norm as emerging not from a collective decision by an informal group, but rather from the purposive interactions of the group's individual members. This essay presents a semi-rigorous model in which a new norm arises out of the workings of a market for norms. Change is triggered by a shift in either cost-benefit conditions or group composition. Because individuals are heterogeneous in important respects, they respond differently to these triggering events. The first persons to supply new norms generally are individuals who have either superior technical knowledge of cost-benefit conditions, superior social knowledge of group dynamics, or special endowments that provide them with unusually high tangible benefits from norm reform. Members of the social audience observe the competing efforts of these norm suppliers and reward the most meritorious ones by conferring either esteem or, according to a rival theory, new exchange opportunities. Under ideal conditions, members of the audience--the demand side of the market for norms--have no incentive to free-ride in rewarding a worthy norm innovator because they incur no net costs when conferring their rewards.

Abstract:
As Aristotle recognized in THE POLITICS, the household is an indispensable building block of social, economic, and political life. A liberal society grants its citizens far wider berth to arrange their households than to choose their familial and marital relationships. Legal commentators, however, have devoted far more attention to the family and to marriage than to the household as such.

To unpack the household, this Article applies transaction cost economics and sociological theory to interactions among household participants. It explores questions such as the structure of ownership of dwelling units, the scope of household production, and the governance of activities around the hearth. Drawing on a wide variety of historical and statistical sources, the Article contrasts conventional family-based households with arrangements in, among others, medieval English castles, Benedictine monasteries, and Israeli kibbutzim.

Most households involve several participants and as many as three distinct relationships - that among occupants, that among owners, and that between these two groups (the landlord-tenant relationship). Individuals, when structuring these home relationships, typically pursue a strategy of consorting with intimates. This facilitates informal coordination and greatly reduces the transaction costs of domestic interactions. Utopian critics, however, have sought to enlarge the scale of households, and some legal advocates have urged household members to write formal contracts and take disputes into court. These commentators fail to appreciate the great advantages, in the home setting, of informally associating with a few trustworthy intimates.

Household, family, homeownership, landlord, co-ownership, social norms, theory of the firm, intentional community, housing

Abstract:
This study tracks the popularity of fifteen intellectual approaches among legal scholars during the period 1982-1996. Each approach was assigned one or more proxies consisting of a characteristic word or phrase associated with the approach. Searches were conducted in a Westlaw database to determine trends in the appearance of these proxies in law review texts. A method was devised for neutralizing distortions attributable to changes in database size over time. Among the findings: little or no decline in doctrinal analysis; a modest rise in law and economics; and a boom and subsequent bust in Critical Legal Scholarship (CLS). Leading law reviews have been unusually prone to publish works that refer to civic-republicanism, CLS, Critical Race Theory, and social norms.

Abstract:
Since the 1970s a new vehicle for the provision of housing assistance - the mixed-income, or inclusionary, project - has flowered in the United States. In a community of this sort, the developer and its government benefactors designate a fraction of the dwelling units, typically between 10 and 25 percent, as targets for the delivery of aid. Eligible households who successively occupy these particular units pay below-market rents, while the occupants of the other units do not. This article situates this innovation within the broader history of U.S. housing assistance policy and evaluates its merits. The central conclusion is that the mixed-income project approach, while superior to the traditional public-housing model, is in almost all contexts distinctly inferior to the provision of portable housing vouchers to needy tenants. Although prior commentators have also touted the voucher approach, the article enriches their analyses by addressing more fully the social consequences of various housing policies that might be used to economically integrate neighborhoods and buildings.

affordable housing, housing policy, inclusionary zoning, mixed-income housing, public housing, housing vouchers, Section 8, neighborhood integration

Abstract:
Commentators rightly decry the excessive segregation of American neighborhoods by race and social class. If all demographic groups were randomly distributed throughout a metropolitan area, however, there would be great diversity within each neighborhood, but no diversity among them. There is much evidence that most people, including most African Americans, would object to that outcome because it would prevent households from choosing among varying social environments. Drawing in part on Robert Putnam's distinction between bonding and bridging social capital, this paper explores the perplexing normative issue of the optimal residential distribution of different social groups.

integration, segregation, Tiebout, exclusionary zoning, clubs

Abstract:
The irrepressible Richard Epstein has been one of the most provocative and wide-ranging of contemporary legal scholars. According to Epstein’s own account, he started out as a natural rights libertarian, but then morphed slightly into a utilitarian. Other important strands of conservative thought have not commanded his consistent allegiance. Epstein has never shown any affinity, for example, to Burkean traditionalism. Moreover, Epstein’s interest in the structural principle of federalism, which favors the decentralization of power where feasible, has run hot and cold. For example, he has sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision that declined to rule that a locality’s misuse of the power of eminent domain violated the federal Public Use Clause. This essay criticizes the merits of the redevelopment project at issue in Kelo, but also argues, on federalist principles, that the Supreme Court of the United States was correct in that instance to decide that it should not be on the front lines of the battle against eminent domain abuse.

federalism, Kelo, eminent domain, Richard Epstein, conservative thought

Abstract:
In a given year, a resident of the United States is roughly twice as likely as a resident of France to move to another permanent dwelling. This essay contends that differences in the legal policies of the two nations - in particular, taxation policies, land use laws, landlord-tenant laws, and housing assistance programs - have significantly contributed to this disparity in residential mobility. The essay also puts forward a normative framework for analyzing the desirability of population movement. Legal policies that foster residential moves can enable individuals to better match themselves with a job, a dwelling, a set of housemates, a tenure arrangement, a neighborhood, and a municipality (à la Tiebout). A decision to move, however, may give rise to negative neighborhood externalities, such as erosion of local social capital. In theory, although rarely in practice, people thus can move too often.