Soul-shaping cases

In response to Rick's post, I too am be curious how many people can identify personally influential cases. As a young lawyer and law clerk, I was known (and teased) for always getting outraged about some indignity perpetrated by the government against the little guy. (Street-vendor harassment was a particular pet peeve.) Anyway, as the other Prof. Garnett (OPG, as the students say) knows well, I've been outraged about the Poletown case ever since Bob Ellickson's Property class in 1993. The very idea that the government could displace 3500 people because a private company asked them to do so just blew my mind.

I guess it is fair to say that Poletown really did shape, and continues to shape, how I think about the law. Ever since that class discussion of Poletown, I haven’t stopped worrying about the way that the law – especially economic policy – can work to the detriment of the "little guy." (I might almost be one of Ron Wright's liberation libertarians!)  This worry led me to work for two years as an attorney with the Institute for Justice; and it has influenced the course of my own scholarly work. Now, admittedly, my views have been somewhat tempered over time. I still think Poletown was an outrage, but I now understand why Detroit thought it needed to do what it did. (For a recent discussion of the problem, see Bill Fischel's excellent short essay on the case.). I also have come to realize, through my own work, that the "answer" to the public-use problem is more difficult than I thought as a second-year law student. Perhaps this is why I was much less outraged about Kelo than about Poletown, although I am hopeful that federal and state legislators will follow through on their promises to limit the eminent domain power.

Indeed, my conservative (small and large C) leanings lead me to conclude that, most of the time, the courts may not be the best place to resolve these problems. This is why much of my work focuses on critiquing -- and proposing legislative reforms to -- regulatory policies that are generally under the radar screens of "law" professors. (The legal academy’s general disregard for these state and local policies is itself a shame because these policies are the ones that shape the daily lives of regular people – Oh, here I go getting outraged again.)