Ownership Rights and the Rites of Ownership

Using condominium owner and landowner narratives about their property, I consider how people answer the question, What does it mean to own something? These property narratives are framed around three sets of social practices, myths, and beliefs which I call rites of identity, rites of settlement, and rites of struggle—the rites of ownership. According to these narratives, ownership requires that the person possessing the property carry out these rites. Their sense of entitlement—ownership rights—is framed by these rites. Following the rites makes one a deserving property owner. Property rights are seen as protectors against arbitrary, unpredictable changes in status that violate these owners, sense that they are entitled to keep what they had worked so hard for and planned for so long. I conclude with a discussion of the value of property narratives for understanding the link between law and culture.     

Gone with the Wind: Federalism and the Strategic Location of Air Polluters

In federal systems, both state governments and firms have incentives to strategically locate polluting facilities where the environmental and health consequences will be borne as much as possible by residents of other jurisdictions. We analyze air polluter location in the United States using a spatial point pattern model, which models where events occur in latitude and longitude. Our analyses indicate that major air polluters are significantly more likely to be located near a state's downwind border than a control group of other industrial facilities, results that are robust to a wide variety of model specifications and measurement strategies. This effect is particularly pronounced for facilities with toxic air emissions. The observed pattern of polluter location varies systematically across states and time in ways that suggest it is responsive to public policy at both the national and state levels.     

Does carcass enrichment alter community structure of predaceous and parasitic arthropods? A second test of the arthropod saturation hypothesis at the Anthropology Research Facility in Knoxville, Tennessee

In a second test of an arthropod saturation hypothesis, we analyzed if the on-campus Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with its 20+ yr history of carcass enrichment, is comparable to non-enriched sites in community structure of predatory and parasitic arthropods that prey upon the sarcosaprophagous fauna. Over a 12-day period in June 1998, using pitfall traps and sweep nets, 10,065 predaceous, parasitic, and hematophagous (blood-feeding) arthropods were collected from freshly euthanized pigs (Sus scrofa L.) placed at ARF and at three surrounding sites various distances away (S2-S4). The community structure of these organisms was comparable in most paired-site tests with respect to species composition, colonization rates, and evenness of pitfall-trap abundances on a per carcass basis. Site differences were found in rarefaction tests of both sweep-net and pitfall-trap taxa and in tests of taxonomic evenness and ranked abundances of sweep-net samples. Despite these differences, no evidence was found that the predatory/parasitic fauna at ARF was impoverished with fewer but larger populations as a result of carcass enrichment. Comparison of the sarcosaprophagous and predatory/parasitic faunas revealed a tighter (and more predictable) linkage between carrion feeders (sarcosaprovores) and their carrion than between carrion feeders and their natural enemies (predators and parasitoids), leading us to conclude that ARF is more representative of surrounding sites with respect to the sarcosaprovore component than to the predatory/parasitic component within the larger carrion-arthropod community.     

Promoting Participation? An Examination of Rulemaking Notification and Access Procedures

This study documents state implementation of mechanisms designed to promote public participation in agency rulemaking. Many scholars have questioned the effectiveness of such mechanisms, arguing that they fail to encourage greater participation or that increased participation does not affect the substance of administrative rules. Using data from a unique survey of state administrators, the author employs multivariate analyses to assess the relationship between these measures and the perceived influence of external actors. The results suggest that critics may understate the importance of public notification and access procedures. These devices are associated with increases in the impact that a wide variety of actors are perceived to have on the content of agency rules.