LAKEFRONT: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago

Join the Chicago Lawyers Chapter of The Federalist Society for an author presentation lunch with Prof. Tom Merrill and Prof. Nicole Garnett.

 

Featuring:

• Thomas W. Merrill, Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia University
• Nicole Garnett, John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at University of Notre Dame Law School

 

$10 Students, $25 Members, $35 Non-members

 

About This Event

How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset?

The product of two decades of research, Lakefront sets forth the social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending.

The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in later twentieth century to be-come the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights.

Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront’s evolution from the middle of the 19th Century to the 21st. 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.