Charles M. Haar

Judges as agents of social change: Can the courts break the affordable housing deadlock in metropolitan areas?

Abstract Nowhere is the chasm between the races more apparent than in the physical division of metropolitan areas between inner‐city poverty and suburban affluence. Thus far, public policy efforts to introduce metropolitan perspectives into local land use regulations have been unsuccessful. The series of New Jersey Mount Laurel decisions lays out a possible path for introducing comprehensive regional planning by deploying the constitutional power of state courts. Relying on the allied professions of economics and city planning, the New Jersey Supreme Court eliminated the legal barriers to affordable housing in the suburbs. Questions have been raised over courts’ ability to reform local government powers, but many traditional objections to the effectiveness of judicial reform seem to have been overcome in the New Jersey litigations and legislations. State courts can play an indispensable role in solving regional land use problems if they secure the support of community leadership groups.

Revitalising the inner city: the USA Experiences

Amidst the sound and fury of a new presidential campaign, one consolation is that national programmes come in for fresh scrutiny. And re-examining the United States urban policy, we are struck with how the pendulum of social policy has swung once more, this time to the inner core of the metropolitan area and to ‘redeveloping the central city’. The programmes for land policies and human settlements have moved around to where they swayed over thirty years ago. “In our end is our beginning,” to paraphrase T. S. Eliot.

Landmark Justice: The Influence of William J. Brennan, Jr., on America's Communities

Abstract BALANCING PUBLIC AND PRIVATE RIGHTS: Distilled to its essence, a land use case presents a clash between private and public rights. Property owners assert that the government has impermissibly interfered with that bundle of rights called private property. Governments respond that they are properly exercising their authority in order to advance the public welfare. Under our constitutional scheme, it is left to the judicial branch to referee this contest and draw the line between private and public domains. In so doing, judges must consult broad constitutional and statutory clauses providing only the vaguest guidelines for assessing the propriety of the contested government action.