{"id":29637,"date":"2021-06-22T23:09:38","date_gmt":"2021-06-23T04:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=29637"},"modified":"2021-09-17T11:06:06","modified_gmt":"2021-09-17T16:06:06","slug":"collecting-posts-on-the-public-trust-doctrine-in-its-american-birthplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2021\/06\/collecting-posts-on-the-public-trust-doctrine-in-its-american-birthplace\/","title":{"rendered":"Collecting Posts on the Public Trust Doctrine in Its American Birthplace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thank you to my colleague, Professor David A. Strifling<\/a>, director of Marquette Law School\u2019s Water Law and Policy Initiative<\/a>, for his generous post<\/a> a few weeks ago concerning Tom Merrill\u2019s and my new book, Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago<\/em><\/a> (Cornell University Press). The book ranges over almost two centuries and the different stories that led to the Chicago lakefront\u2019s varied but largely integrated and altogether splendid whole. Given these temporal and geographic variations, \u201cthe core insight that shapes Kearney and Merrill’s\u00a0Lakefront<\/em>\u201d\u2014that “[t]he making of Chicago’s extraordinary landscape along Lake Michigan required law, lots and lots of law\u201d (Professor Hendrik Hartog of Princeton University)\u2014made intuitive sense to us from the beginning. Or at least it did to my coauthor<\/a>, a noted scholar of property law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Major areas along the Chicago lakefront (map by Chicago CartoGraphics): Figure 0.2 from Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Cornell, 2021)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yet as our book\u2019s title suggests, however much other<\/em> law has been involved, the public trust doctrine has been at the forefront of lakefront controversies, at least since the Supreme Court of the United States used the Lake Front Case<\/em> (more formally known as Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois<\/em><\/a>, 146 U.S. 387 (1892)) to announce the American experiment with the doctrine. So Professor Merrill and I took a guest-blogging opportunity<\/a> at the Volokh Conspiracy<\/a> this past week to focus on the public trust doctrine. Here are links to our series of posts:<\/p>\n