DUBLIN CITY Council has denied claims that it could break its contract with the developers of the Poolbeg incinerator without incurring costs, including potentially punitive compensation payments.

The council was responding yesterday to a report on RTÉ’s Prime Time that a “get-out” clause in the contract signed with incinerator developers Covanta in 2007 would allow it to terminate the contract tomorrow.

The programme reported that the contract for the development of the 600,000 tonne-capacity incinerator runs out tomorrow and the council could extend, renegotiate or walk away from the deal if conditions necessary for the development of the facility had not been by that date.

Minister for the Environment John Gormley has yet to grant a foreshore licence for a cooling facility needed for the plant.

The council yesterday said it did not intend to break the contract and that the incinerator was essential to dealing with Dublin’s waste.

“The Prime Time report on the project aired last night (Thursday Sept 2nd) stated that the council could ‘walk away with no cost’ . . . This is factually incorrect,” the council said.

It said the four Dublin local authorities had already spent substantial sums to date in land acquisition, statutory processes and client representative costs. Dublin city manager John Tierney has previously stated that these costs amount to about €120 million.

The council also said that it was committed to further “major expenditure” in relation to the purchase of lands on the site.

“This does not take into account any compensation that might be payable to the PPP company should the contract be terminated,” it said.

Substantial costs had also been incurred by Covanta, the council said. A spokesman for the company could not be contacted yesterday.

A source close to the project said the compensation, which would be payable to Covanta, would be in the region of €200 million. He also said that tomorrow’s date was no longer relevant in terms of the contract and no moves would be made by either side.

The council said it would be updating city councillors on the matter on Monday night at the first council meeting of the new term, and that it would be making no further comment on the contract until that time.

Mr Gormley, who is in possession of a copy of the contract, was not available to comment on the matter yesterday. However, last week he said that the contract should be renegotiated. A spokesman yesterday said that Mr Gormley’s position remained that the facility was too large and would end up costing the taxpayer money.

An application for the foreshore licence was made to the Department of Agriculture in 2008.

Responsibility for determining foreshore licences was transferred to Mr Gormley’s department last January. Construction of the incinerator began last December but has been suspended since May because, Covanta has said, of the lack of a foreshore licence.

However, the council, following a request from Covanta, last month began a process to compulsorily purchase the land needed for the cooling facility. By taking ownership of the land, the council would no longer need the licence from Mr Gormley.

The compulsory purchase process could involve Bord Pleanála hearing, and could involve further expense and delays for the project. It is not known if the contract was renegotiated at the time the council agreed to start the process.

Mr Gormley last March appointed accountant John Hennessy SC to carry out an independent examination of the contract and its financial implications.

Mr Hennessy’s report is due shortly.

Irish Times

www.buckplanning.ie

I will be in Berkeley for only one more day so I'm sitting in a Starbucks thinking about the synergies between buying a solar home and buying an electric vehicle. Let's do some arithmetic together --- concerning the simple economics of green product bundling and the joint purchase of solar panels and an electric vehicle.


In case #1, a solar home owner doesn't own an electric vehicle and she can't sell back "excess power" generation (production - household electricity consumption) back to the grid.

In Case #2, a solar home owner doesn't own an electric vehicle and she can sell back "excess power" generation (production - household electricity consumption) back to the grid at a constant price per kWh.

In Case #3, a solar home owner owns an electric vehicle and she can sell back "excess power" generation (production - household electricity consumption - electricity used by the electric vehicle) back to the grid at a constant price per kWh.


If our goal is to increase residential solar installation then; Case #3 > Case #2 > Case #1. Why?

Consider Case #1: households will only install solar panels if they are big Berkeley greens (the warm glow) or if they are major electricity consumers and located in an area (San Diego) that is sunny and where electricity prices are high.

Case #2: The payoff of selling back power back to the grid is low if the price per kWh is low.

Now consider Case #3: Suppose that an electric car travels 3 miles per kWh. A household who drives 45 miles per day will either need to generate 15 kWh using its solar panels or purchase this extra power per day. If this household owned a vehicle that achieved a MPG of 22.5 and if the price of gasoline is $3 per gallon, then this household would have spent $6 per day (roughly $2,000 a year on gas).

I recognize that a price of $.1 per kWh, it appers to be cheap to purchase this power from the utility for your PHEV rather than producing the power yourself.

So, those who install solar panels have an incentive to buy a PHEV vehicle. The incentives for PHEV owners to install solar panels appear to be lower unless the price of electricity is expected to sharply increase.


The ability to recharge your vehicle using your own self generation (the solar panels) allows you to insure yourself against gas price volatility. You know have the option of selling your power to the utility or reducing your gasoline bill. (So I am implicitly assuming that a household owns 2 vehicles and one is gasoline and one is a PHEV vehicle).

An interesting economics question is whether households who own PHEV vehicles AND if they could sell power to their adjacent neighbors for their PHEV vehicles would choose to supersize their solar systems to generate more power than their residential home needs. Would the California PUC support this?

Now, I have not discussed PHEV demand in multi-family buildings. I predict a type of Tiebout sorting will take place as "green", electric vehicle lovers will self select to live in buildings that advertise that they have installed recharger stations. For some details click
here .

Today's Telegraph has a piece about embarrassing or stigmatised street names. Changing the name of a street is an expensive and lengthy process, as the article points out, and risks washing away some valued nuggets of local history. Often these are not just rows of houses, but places with an accumulated shared history. Whatever is wrong with 'Brewery Street'? Let's take a closer look.

Apparently the inhabitants of Butt Hole Road

had to put up with coach loads of US tourists visiting to have their pictures taken near the road sign...

- so I can certainly understand the motivation there, as in circumstances which involve nothing more complicated than confirming one's address over the phone to a tedious tittering office twat.

But where we English excel is in our unfailing adherence to the tradition of snobbery, and some street name changes can only be accounted for in terms of collective snobbery. Like these examples cited:

Residents of Whiteway Avenue, near Bath, changed their street to the more picturesque Englishcombe Rise, because of the "negative connotations" of sharing a name with a nearby suburb called Whiteway.

In Walsall, part of Beddows Road was renamed Lavender Grove because the old name had become associated with a high crime rate and anti social behaviour.

...In Bournemouth, Derby Road was changed to Garden Views because the new name was "perceived to have more desirable connotations".

The real interest now could be in what effect, if any, these changes have had. 'Beddows' may smell as sweet as 'Lavender' but do people there and in surrounding streets genuinely perceive a difference that is measurable not solely in house prices?

 

And the cities like Flint, Akron, Kokomo, and Youngstown the collapse of industrial age companies has hit hard. Yet, in each of these cities and universities serving as a hub to build an innovation economy. Here's the story of what has been happening in Flint, around Kettering University.

And Kettering University’s long-dreamt of $3.4 million Innovation Center celebrates its grand opening today next to Vehicle City’s notorious landmark Chevy in the Hole where automobile factories once boomed.

“Just like Chevy and all of the different products created here created employment for Flint in the last century, this building holds promise of creating companies that can create employment for the next century,” said Neil Sheridan, director of Kettering's TechWorks Technology Accelerator.

And the first tenant of the 9,200-square-foot facility designed to serve as a mecca for small businesses, entrepreneurs and research is already making headlines: Swedish Biogas International, the company that has pledged to produce a renewable alternative fuel at a biogas plant in the city.

Categories: Innovation
Tags: clean energy regeneration universities

Over the past two decades, Owensboro, Kentucky has quietly been putting itself on the map. An urban design firm, engaged in redesigning the Owensboro downtown, provides a look inside the process. Out of the decline of the past, Owensboro has been designing around a new narrative:

The slow death of the Executive Inn ushered in a new era of culture in Owensboro with a nationally recognized symphony, an “off-Broadway” River Park Performing Arts Center, and a new reputation for festivals including the nationally recognized Mystery Writers’ Festival.

Read more.

If you work in a smaller city and are looking for a good model to follow, put Owensboro on your list to visit.

Categories: Quality connected places
Tags: regeneration

A new report out of Texas argues that clean energy could create thousands of new jobs in the state.

According to the report: “The economic benefits would be spectacular” if the state committed to expanding and supporting “green” and renewable energy projects. You can read more about the report in this article. Or, you can browse through the report below.

Texas Clean Energy Economy Report August 2010

Categories: Innovation
Tags: clean energy green jobs

In the distant horizon, a giant wave is building. There are some who recognized the swell and raised the alarm. There are others who deny the possibility of such a wave. Most remain blissfully unaware. The wave is building and when it reaches our shores, it will hit with the force of a tsunami.

The wave is propelled by government spending and crested with unfunded pension obligations. The Pew Center on the States wrote in The Trillion Dollar Gap (February 2010), “A $1 trillion gap exists between the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers as of fiscal year 2008 and the $2.35 trillion they have on hand to pay for them.”

Like any tsunami, the wave began long ago and very far out to sea. Thirty years ago the vast majority of union workers were in the private sector. Public employees in unions reached parity with private sector members by 2009. This was aided in part by campaign contributions from the unions to elect Democratic Party candidates and generous pay packages and retirement plans passed by those same politicians in return.

By 2010, the general public received a series of shocks. The first shock was the jobless recovery of the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs. Most of the job losses occurred in the private sector yet the majority of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill went to “save and create” public sector employment. The second shock was learning that civil servants earned twice that of private workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal workers received average pay and benefits of $123,049 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. The third shock was revelation of incredible retirement plans doled out by politicians since 1999. In 2002, California passed SB 183 that allowed police and safety workers to retire after 30 years on the job with 3% of salary for each year of service, or 90% of their last year’s pay. During the Great Recession, fireman began retiring with $150,000 pensions at age 52 despite a life expectancy approaching 80. In Orange County CA, lifeguards, deemed safety workers, retired with $147,000 annual pensions. The Orange County sheriff, recently convicted of witness tampering, will receive $215,000 annually while in jail. Bob Citron, the Treasurer of Orange County who pushed the county into bankruptcy in the 1990s, receives a pension of $150,000 per year. A tsunami of anger and resentment is building.

As the wave approaches, economists issue thick reports with ominous names like “The Gathering Storm” (Reason Foundation) advising us that the pension obligations we have created are unsustainable. They report cities and states cannot economically allow workers to retire at 52 when they have a life expectancy of 26 years of retirement. They simply cannot pay for these pensions with existing revenue. Services will go down and taxes will go up to pay for these generous pension obligations. Orange County’s CEO, Thomas G. Mauk, predicted that pension requirements in 2014 will take 84% of the county’s law enforcement payroll. It is already 50% today. To exacerbate the problem, The Great Recession forced most states into budget deficits as their revenues decline. For FY2010, every state except Montana and North Dakota has projected a budget deficit. (RedState 3/21/2010).

California once again leads the nation with a $26 billion budget deficit plus an unfunded pension obligation of $500 billion. Its current financial structure is clearly unsustainable. It has an operational structure that in ungovernable with often duplicative agencies, some collecting less in tax revenue than the agencies spend on collection. Wikipedia lists 500 existing public agencies for the State of California. California can no longer afford such a luxury. It must deconstruct these bloated inefficient government agencies, and rid itself of their chairman, staff, offices, cars, pensions and the overhead that such excess represents. A $26 billion dollar deficit is not something that can be corrected with a wage freeze or job furloughs. Bold leadership can lead California to deconstruct its 500 agencies down to 100 functional organizations. California is a classic example of what must change in the coming Great Deconstruction.

One Orange County city has already taken bold steps to correct its $10 million deficit. It may be a model for other cities and states across the country. Internally, it has decided it will not replace any city worker that dies, retires, moves or quits. The city will simply out source the employment to an outside service company and eliminate healthcare requirements and unsustainable pensions. Building inspectors will be out sourced as will city plan checkers, librarians and meter maids. Only essential services like top executives and cops will remain on the city payroll. The city staff will eventually decrease from 220 to approximately 35 personnel. This is the essence of deconstruction.

At the state and local level, the Great Deconstruction has already begun albeit delayed by an infusion of federal stimulus dollars and grants in 2009 and 2010. The federal government must deconstruct as well. It must happen, if only because the revenue is no longer there to sustain all of these often well-intentioned programs. The federal government will not be immune from fiscal reality.

In this sense, the election in November will be a referendum on the very sustainability of our system of government. One party will continue to borrow and spend in order to maintain the 500 agencies in California and the abundance of federal programs. They have not said how long they will be able to borrow money to sustain their system. The other party will try to simply turn off the spigot - now. Either way, one day the money will run out and the inevitable deconstruction will occur.

***************************************************

The Great Deconstruction is a series written exclusively for New Geography. Future articles will address the impact of The Great Deconstruction at the national, state, county and local levels.

Robert J. Cristiano PhD is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange County, CA and Director of Special Projects at the Hoag Center for Real Estate & Finance. He has been a successful real estate developer in Newport Beach California for twenty-nine years.

Other works in The Great Deconstruction series for New Geography
An Awakening: The Beginning of the Great Deconstruction – June 12, 2010
The Great Deconstruction :An American History Post 2010 – June 1, 2010
The Great Deconstruction – First in a New Series - April 11, 2010
Deconstruction: The Fate of America? – March 2010

Washington DC's Union Station.

See ""City Beautiful" Comes Alive in Daniel Burnham Documentary" from the Architectural Record. We like Burnham in DC because of the McMillan Plan and Union Station. From the article:

“Burnham was interested in the city not only as a physical artifact,” says Howard Decker, FAIA, a planner and project director with Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects, “but as a social and cultural artifact.” Decker, who appears on-camera, notes that Burnham addressed many of the challenges that face architects and planners today: population growth, sprawl, environmental degradation. “It’s another reason to go back and look at the city Burnham was interested in—it’s the city before the Modern city. Maybe it’s an appropriate model to undo some of the damage we’ve done.”

But I don't agree that the City Beautiful movement, unmodified, is the best example for urban futures.

Jane Jacobs is critical of the City Beautiful movement in Death and Life of Great American Cities. Originally, I didn't understand why. But now I do. The monumentality of the buildings is beautiful from a distance but except for certain exceptions, it fails to work at the ground level in terms of fine grained urbanism and vitality at the level of the storefront, building, sidewalk, and street. The big beautiful buildings are usually accompanied by big, beautiful, and very empty if not forlorn spaces.

You really can see this with the Mall in Cleveland, also done by Burnham. It's very much empty of people and activity. But very beautiful.


This isn't the case with Union Station because it is a transit center and surrounded by activity centers--office buildings and is a short walk to the U.S. Capitol Complex--and abuts the Capitol Hill residential neighborhood. So more than 20 million people move through the station and the area every year and the area around the complex is active.

It's also a reasonably successful shopping center ("Ground lease for Union Station changes hands from the Washington Business Journal), although the food court has had its ups and downs and is the subject of a controversial proposal to cut a hole in the center hall of the station to provide more visual and direct access, and the movie cineplex has been closed (the station managers didn't like the clientele I think).

Although by comparison on the weekends when the office buildings are empty, Union Station can have a somewhat forlorn quality. For example, the bikestation, where the concessionaire makes most of its income from bike rentals, is closed on Sundays.

David Barth, a planner at AECOM, has a model for updating the City Beautiful's approach by adding to it the principles of new urbanism. He calls his model "City Revival" although it hasn't yet received a textbook treatment. City Revival doesn't just focus on grand civic buildings. It considers and links community buildings, neighborhoods, town centers (commercial and entertainment areas), streets, the environment, and parks and open space into one integrated system.

In the meantime, Cy Paumier's primer, Creating a Vibrant City Center, is a better model for advice for how to improve cities than that provided by Burnham.

But we should still watch the documentary.

Oldschool Fantasy Continent Map

¡¡¡Residencia artística por un dia!!! / One-day artistic residence

Southern Cross

Most_Viral_Brands_2010_Infographic:

An infographic showing the most viral brands of 2010 in the UK

by Stephen Smith

Adam Martin at William Easterly’s development blog Aid Watch has a post up warning about the tendency among developing nations to adopt Western styles wholesale, even if such styles are not even efficient in their countries of origin. He posits this as a sort of developmental Whiggishness, and cites education policy and intellectual property law as possible examples of the trend. We here at Market Urbanism, by virtue of language and location, tend to focus on urbanism in North America and Europe, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the state of urbanism in developing countries.

The starkest example of misplaced developmental Whiggishness in planning I can think of is the city of Kuala Lumpur. The city was practically brand new when it was made capital of the Federal Malay States in 1895, and as a British protectorate, the Crown sent New Zealand planner Charles Reade to the Malaysian capital in 1921 to head its planning department. Schooled in the methods of the nascent Garden City movement in the UK, Reade made a name for himself by spreading the sprawling, proto-suburban style throughout Australia and New Zealand before his posting in British Malaya. Under Reade’s aegis, Kuala Lumpur became a test case for the movement’s applicability outside of the industrialized West.

Housing estate in Malaysia

Unlike in the West, where dense, built-up urban cores relegated Garden City developments to small new towns and the outskirts of large cities, Kuala Lumpur offered an opportunity to build a metropolis from scratch as a Garden City. Charles Reade eagerly set to work building sprawling, low-density housing estates alongside wide roads which anticipated widespread private vehicle ownership. Residential, commercial, and industrial areas were segregated and separated by grassy, undeveloped parkbelts, characteristic of the Garden City style.

Following independence, a nationalist Malaysian government used a hybrid Japanese/American industrial policy (under the inauspicious moniker of “five-year plans”) to foster a domestically-oriented automobile industry, fulfilling Reade’s prophesy of Kuala Lumpur as an auto-oriented city. With two state-owned car manufacturers – Proton established in the ’80s and Perodua in the ’90s – middle-class car ownership became a national prerogative. In addition to bankrolling the two auto companies, the government subsidized gasoline and civil servants’ car loans, and embarked on an ambitious road-building scheme.

Beyond the British-style town planning of the 1920s and the hybrid American/Japanese industrial policy of the 1980s, Kuala Lumpur also began instituting American-style restrictions on density. Private minibuses were regulated out of existence and public bus service has not adapted to changing land use patterns.  In addition to height and density limitations, developers are faced with sprawl-promoting minimum parking requirements to the point where Kuala Lumpur’s downtown has twice as many parking spaces as not only its middle-income Asian counterparts, but also wealthy Asian cities like Singapore and Tokyo.

Kuala Lumpur may be the most blatant example of poorly-advised adoption of Western land use policy, but other cities around Asia exhibit similar anti-urban tendencies. Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila are also “parking requirement enthusiasts,” and urban transportation scholar Paul Barter believes that similar dynamics may be at play in South Asian cities. The state of apartment buildings in Mumbai, 60% of which had controlled rents as late as 2006, makes the South Bronx look like the Upper East Side. The late Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach once said that artificially low rents were more destructive to Hanoi’s housing stock than American bombing.

Bucharest, post-Ceaushima

Outside of the immediate region, the communist world has adopted, to its detriment, many Western planning tendencies. Communist planners pursued the urban planning theories of Le Corbusier, the eminent Swiss architect and designer, with particular zeal, turning what to the West was a passing fad into the communist world’s sole planning style. While the French never seriously considered Le Corbusier’s plan to demolish most buildings within central Paris’ Right Bank and replace them with towers and parks with highways along the Seine, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu implemented his ideas quite faithfully in Bucharest, once known as the “Little Paris of the East” for its architecture. He razed vast swathes of the oldest, densest parts of the city and replaced them with towering apartment blocks, vast open spaces, and massive roads. In keeping with the Vietnamese foreign minister’s bombing theme, locals have dubbed Ceaușescu’s planning disaster “Ceaushima.”

Other communist cities, like Moscow and Pyongyang, built their typically-communist tower blocks on the outskirts of town, wherever there was open land. This resulted in a peculiar situation where density rises as one gets farther away from the city center, making mass transit difficult to implement. And while communist regimes didn’t envision widespread car ownership, their sense of grandiosity and love of military parades led to the construction of wide boulevards that discourage walkability and are now choked with cars. Like Le Corbusier, the communists despised the sort of petty commerce and consumerism that bustling streets and alleyways exude, so the isolated residential towers that dot the urban landscape of former communist countries have little in the way of ground-level retail. While Le Corbusier’s urban planning legacy in the West is limited to a dwindling number of decrepit high-rise public housing projects, the damage in communist countries, where all housing was public housing, is much longer-lasting.

In some ways, pro-sprawl urban planning has done more damage to countries like Malaysia and Romania than to the West. Unlike the Anglosphere and Europe, which already had relatively dense and developed urban cores before sprawl set in, developing countries are still in the process of urbanizing, so their older, denser cores do not have the capacity to hold much of the population. Some cities, like Kuala Lumpur or Pyongyang, had almost no pre-planning development; others, like Bucharest, had their historic centers redeveloped into Corbusian wastelands. The US had its freeway revolts and Western planning professionals have started to reconsider forced suburbanization, but the developing world is still waiting for its Jane Jacobs.

Academic references

1. Garnaut, Christine. “Chronicles from the far east: the garden city model of planning in the Federated Malay States, 1920-1929.” [source]
2. Mohamad, Jamilah and Amin T. Kiggundu. “The rise of the private car in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.” [source]
3. Barter, Paul A. “Transport, urban structure and ‘lock-in’ in the Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Area.” [source]
4. Renaud, Bertrand. “The urban dimension of the North Korean economy: a speculative analysis.” [source]
5. Richards, Simon. “The anti-social urbanism of Le Corbusier.” [source]

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Infografico: YouTube comemora 5 anos, veja sua evolução.:

Este mês o YouTube completa seu quinto aniversário. Durante estes rápidos cinco anos, a web se transformou de várias formas e o YouTube sempre fez parte dessas mudanças.

Para mais infos acesse:
prumos.com.br
twitter.com/prumos
flickr.com/prumos
youtube.com/prumos
slideshare.com/prumos
facebook.com/prumos

Para quem usa o Facebook:
Campanha Redes Sociais
Campanhas Google
Campanhas Digitais

The Last Time We Walked on the Moon:

Posted via email from FotoGrafia

School Librarians/Media Specialists:

Was very surprised to see so many districts with NO library media specialists! Interesting data mapping from NCES - nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/ed/index.asp?st=NY Gathering data sources for a workshop on creating community profiles.

UT McCombs School of Business 2010 Incoming Students:

Stay connected with the McCombs community at McCombs TODAY at blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/mccombs-today/

The problem of center city decline is not new, especially if you are from the midwest of the United States, where deindustrialization and globalization has led to the decimation of so many communities. I have been interested in this for awhile, every since I first learned about the Youngstown 2010 project in 2001.

The Boston Globe has a nice piece in tomorrow's paper on the topic, "How to shrink a city:Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback. Planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline."

My only problem with this discussion is that policymakers in the U.S. tend not to be very nuanced in their application of "big ideas."

Places like Detroit, which has lost 1/2 its population and the main industries are in decline, and is in the midwest, or communities like Flint, Michigan, have many fewer opportunities than cities on the east coast of the U.S. such as Philadelphia, Newark, or Baltimore. After all, is was not that long ago that Brooklyn and other parts of New York City were considered to be seriously declining.

Planning for contraction (a term my friend Drew Ronneberg, a resident and advocate--he is now an ANC commissioner in 6A) needs to be a robust process, based on the right frameworks and typologies of communities and both their reasons for decline and the opportunities that are present or can be realized.

-- Shrinking Cities project (Europe)
-- Dan Kildee's Center for Community Progress
-- Bringing Buildings Back by Mallach
-- National Vacant Properties Campaign
-- Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference, Cleveland, 10/13-15/2010

You may have missed the live program, but it's still not too late to get the podcast of a recent discussion of Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Dep't of Environmental Protection, No. 08-11 (June 17, 2010), the Supreme Court case about judicial takings and beachfront property. Here's the course description from ALI-ABA:

In an unusual takings case, Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Florida Supreme Court relied on state real property law to conclude that the objecting beachfront property owners lacked a valid property right, and thus the state could "renourish" the beaches. The beachfront owners appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to recognize a new doctrine of judicial takings.

On June 17, 2010, the Supreme Court issued its opinion, which may be a partial victory for property-rights advocates. Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito all endorsed the idea that the Takings Clause applies to all three branches of government. But the case leaves significant questions about the broader concept of judicial takings. These questions are either unanswered or under-analyzed, and there does not appear to be a consensus about how to go forward.

Join our panel of experts as they explore the questions arising from the decision. Registrants will have the opportunity to submit questions to the faculty prior to and during the program.

James Burling (Pacific Legal Foundation), Richard Frank (U.C. Davis), and Steven Eagle (George Mason) were on the panel.

Note: at the ABA Annual Meeting in August in San Francisco, we put on a live program which included Mr. Burling and Professor Frank (in addition to Professor John Echeverria and Dan Stengle, Esq., counsel for the petitioners). We are in the process of repeating the session in a teleconference. Stay tuned for more about that.

The curve of a closed eyelid, the outline of a nose, an unmistakable set of lips: enough to discern the outline of a singer, covering, along with the notes floating up from her mouth, almost all of a multistory building in Akasaka. Halfway across Tokyo, a family of turtles somehow scales the vertical wall of [...]