Join the HLS Library on Tuesday February 15 at 12:30pm ET for a HLS Library Book Talk! This event features a discussion on Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago with authors Joseph Kearney and Thomas Merrill and panelists Henry Smith, Richard Lazarus, and Carol Rose. This event is free and will be recorded. Registration is required. If you, or an event participant, require disability-related accommodations, please contact Accessibility Services at [email protected]. Register at https://bit.ly/KearneyFeb2022.
More about the book from Cornell University Press:
How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront — its most treasured asset? The book’s authors study the lakefront’s evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago’s history but also the law’s part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts. The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. The book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. The book compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared to more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses.
