Modernisation in English nuisance law

I somehow missed this one from Ben Pontin: "A room with a view in English nuisance law: exploring modernisation hidden within the ‘textbook tradition’". published in Legal Studies in 2018. The abstract:

The paper critically examines the consensus among tort scholars that an injured view can never be actionable in nuisance. The consensus, it is argued, is based on a problematic understanding of the permanence of early modern nuisance authority, and a neglect of modernisation in the definition of actionable injury in the nineteenth century, in response to industrialisation, urbanisation and, crucially, suburbanisation. David Sugarman's ‘textbook tradition’ provides a valuable disciplinary explanation for the mismatch between scholarly portrayals of doctrine and authoritative judicial formulations in decided cases.

For the uninitiated (like me), Pontin explains in the article (I've removed footnotes and added links):

The idea under consideration of a mismatch between formal law and academic exposition opens onto well-charted territory. David Sugarman made an important contribution to this with his critique of the ‘English textbook tradition’. Sugarman's thesis is that Victorian and Edwardian-era legal scholars, exemplified by Professor Frederick Pollock, wrote textbooks that emphasised the permanence of common law principles, downplaying their changeability. They did so in order to counter a negative impression of the common law as chaotic and unpredictable, and thereby unworthy of a university education. The crucial part of Sugarman's analysis for present purposes is that textbook understandings of the common law are ‘not reducible’ to the law itself. Against this, William Twining has suggested that formative legal scholars were attuned to the common law's spontaneity, and that Pollock was in fact in the vanguard of a proto-realist understanding of ‘living law’. In defence of Sugarman, I argue that Pollock and other scholars writing about nuisance overlooked the modernity of contemporary case law. 

Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Bt (by Lafayette)

Cars

The January issue of Environmental History had a review by Rudi Volti of Christopher Wells's Car Country: An Environmental History (U Washington Press, 2013). Volti summarizes:

Covering a wide range of relevant topics, Car Country begins with efforts to improve roads and streets that antedated the automobile. This is followed by a chapter on the first phase of automotive evolution, culminating with the transformative Ford Model T. The narrative then returns to roads; efforts to design and build roads for the accommodation of the rapidly expanding automobile fleet are well-covered, along with largely successful efforts to re-define roads as conduits for automotive traffic rather than serving as sites for shopping, socializing, and play in addition to the movement of goods and people. Changing approaches to land use are then taken up in the next chapter, which emphasizes the development, application, and consequences of zoning. The chapter also describes the different perspectives of city planners and traffic engineers, and how the visions of the latter eventually triumphed. Next up is a chapter on the development of the petroleum industry and the significance of gasoline taxes for financing an expanding road network. The succeeding chapter looks into two diametrically opposed aspects of the automobile's domination: the construction of massive manufacturing facilities as exemplified by Ford's River Rouge plant juxtaposed with efforts to make “nature” accessible to motorists through the development of the national parks system and automotive parkways. The final chapter brings the story to recent times and the post-World War II efflorescence of suburbia. Singled out are the rules promulgated by the Federal Housing Administration for low-cost mortgages that favored car-dependent suburban growth. Also spotlighted is the movement of shops, offices, and factories to the suburbs. Greatly aiding these massive relocations was the greatest public-works program of all time, the building of the Interstate Highway System.

An economic view of the history of suburban sprawl

Economist William Fischel has posted "Optimal Suburban Densities: History and Theory", advancing an explanation of why suburban areas have sub-optimal densities. The abstract:

Greg Davis, Wires in West Acton Center

A paradigmatic developing suburb, Acton, Massachusetts, was zoned in 1955 to produce a community of 45,000 people. In 2010, Acton had about 23,000 people and is unlikely to grow much more. I develop a simple model in the Tiebout (1956) tradition to explain why Boston's suburbs, and by extension, most suburbs, have adopted land-use regulations that are arguably too restrictive. The baseline model is that of a single developer who owns all the land in a community and commits herself to a master plan. Private covenants assure that the community will be fully developed, and competition among community developers creates at least locally optimal densities. This outcome is contrasted with a model in which undeveloped land is owned by many developers, who must coordinate their land-use decisions by way of public zoning. Their initial zoning plan is disciplined by the wariness of prospective homebuyers, who decline to buy homes in towns without zoning. New homeowners, however, realize that developer control of zoning could lead to changes that will result in excessive density. As enough of them arrive, they take over the reins of zoning to avoid overdevelopment. 

In a stable housing market, I show that a system by which all homeowners pay for community services by property taxes plus exactions or impact fees for later, higher-cost development leads to the same optimal outcome as a private developer. Finally, I argue that an exogenous shift in housing demand, such as that caused by unexpected inflation in the 1970s, and the (perhaps endogenous) adoption of extra-municipal regulations, is apt to cause all zoned communities to adopt additional restrictions. These can be modeled as if the town acquired a monopoly on development rights because other towns simultaneously limit growth. Acton and all of Boston's suburbs and those of other high-productivity metropolitan areas end up with populations that are arguably too small and housing prices that are too high.