Research

My research focuses on two overarching areas. First, my scholarship addresses doctrinal and legal-structural concerns in affordable and fair housing, the regulatory framework for real estate markets, property theory, constitutional property, and the legal determinants of the built environment. Second, I have worked to revitalize the field of urban law, addressing questions about the intersection of the legal system and cities that include the undertheorized constitutional and administrative dimensions of urban governance as well as critical fault-lines in the legal relationship between states and local governments. Methodologically, I work in legal theory, jurisprudence, doctrinal exegesis, and institutional analysis.

Transactional Dynamics in Real Estate

To elaborate on the first area of my research, I focus on transactional dynamics in real estate, interrogating, for example, the design of deals and relational contracting in the public-private partnerships that characterize affordable multifamily housing development. I also examine equilibrium dynamics in the regulation of mortgage markets and the legal system’s approach to ownership in moments of economic and policy crisis. One of my core concerns is equity in housing, with work that analyzes the legal dimension of models-of-service provision for the unhoused, the administrative dimensions of the regulatory systems that shape development, and the role of emerging technologies in fair housing planning and litigation.

Property Theory and Constitutional Property

In property theory and constitutional property, I explore the interplay between standardization and pluralism in the regulation of property, and challenge contestable assumptions undergirding property law’s approach to owner and investor incentives. I also question prevailing approaches to what courts call “regulatory takings,” an area of law that applies an eminent-domain paradigm to the judicial review of statutory and administrative limitations on property rights. In this vein, my scholarship focuses on the regressive nature of this body of constitutional law and ways in which doctrinal formalism and property-rights statutes undermine democratic determinants of land use regulation and the social obligations of real estate ownership.

Urban Law

In urban law—a field that briefly flourished in the 1960s and 1970s but had essentially disappeared from the legal academy—my scholarship examines the legal structures that define urban governance. This includes novel explorations of local constitutional law through city charters as well as administrative law at the local-government level. Relatedly, my scholarship unearths the dialectical relationship between legal norms and urban phenomena such as density, complexity, and diversity. And in terms of the role of local governments in our federalist system, I have written extensively about the dilemmas of devolution and decentralization as well as state preemption and what is known as home rule, the state constitutional basis for local legal authority. Among other projects, I am working on a book that synthesizes and extends my work on the interplay between law and urbanism, to better define the field and introduce it to interdisciplinary audiences.

As noted, my methodology includes legal theory, jurisprudential perspectives, and doctrinal exegesis in real estate, land use and property, as well as in urban law and state and local government. Much of my work also engages in institutional analysis, foregrounding and interrogating the legal-structural determinants of the built environment and local governance.