Environmental Justice, Property Rights, and Zoning

This panel will focus on the pros and cons of zoning, its relation to environmental justice, its detrimental (or beneficial) impacts on minorities, and its consistency (or inconsistency) with property rights. Importantly, the discussion will engage with the scope of modern zoning and what, if anything, should be done to alter, increase, or decrease the government's zoning power. Given the rise of environmental justice in administrative policy and academic debate, this event presents a timely discussion of environmental justice's application to debates over zoning policy in the United States. Criticisms of zoning are on the rise from both the right and left. Critics focus on the ignoble racial history of zoning and its detrimental impacts on the housing market and property values. Defenders instead look to the community stability provided by zoning and the separation of industrial from residential property uses. This panel will present varying views from across the intellectual spectrum featuring both criticisms and defenses of zoning from the right and left. Featuring:Prof. Nicole Stelle Garnett, John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law, University of Notre DameRandall O'Toole, Blogger, The AntiplannerRichard Rothstein, Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense FundProf. Christopher Serkin, Elisabeth H. and Granville S. Ridley Jr. Chair in Law and Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of ManagementModerator: Adam Griffin, Law Clerk, U.S. District Courts