2012 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize winner announced

2012 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize winner announced

by Ami Dodson, WM Law School Communications
| 
January 30, 2012

The Property Rights Project at William Mary Law School announces that Professor James E. Krier,
Earl Warren DeLano Professor of Law at University of Michigan Law
School, is the 2012 recipient of the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights
Prize. Professor Krier will accept his award during the Ninth Annual
Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference, October 11-12, at William
Mary Law School.

“Professor Krier is an outstanding choice for the Brigham-Kanner Prize,” said Lynda Butler,
Chancellor Professor of Law and Director of the Property Rights
Project. “He has been a leading property scholar for decades and is
known to many a law student and professor for his groundbreaking
casebook on Property. What makes Jim’s scholarship special is
his ability to bring so many different disciplinary perspectives to bear
on a property issue or problem, and he always does so in an engaging
and thought-provoking way.”

Krier teaches courses on property, trusts and estates, behavioral law
and economics, and pollution policy. His research interests are
primarily in the fields of property and law and economics, and he is the
author or coauthor of several books, including Environmental Law and Policy, Pollution and Policy, and Property (7th edition). Krier’s most recent articles have been published in Harvard Law Review, Supreme Court Economic Review, UCLA Law Review, and Cornell Law Review.
A professor of law at UCLA and Stanford before joining the Michigan Law
faculty in 1983, he has been a visiting professor at both Harvard
University Law School and Cardozo School of Law.

University of Arizona Law School Professor Carol Rose, who received
the Brigham-Kanner Prize in 2010, noted that Krier has long made
significant contributions to property law jurisprudence. “Jim Krier has
been one of the most creative property scholars in the United States for
well over three decades,” Rose said. “His work on property approaches
to environmental problems has been so far ahead of the curve that other
scholars have tended to realize only belatedly that he was there first.
His casebook Property has been a trailblazer in bringing a
modern interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of property, and it
has made a singular contribution to the revitalization of property
scholarship. I frankly do not know where my own scholarship would have
been without his work leading the way. He certainly deserved this award a
long time before me, and I am absolutely delighted to see that he is
this year’s recipient.”

Alan Ackerman, a prominent eminent domain attorney, echoed Butler’s
and Rose’s enthusiasm, describing Professor Krier as an “outstanding
scholar” who has studied the “evolution of American property rights.
Professor Krier has recognized that property rights are intrinsic in our
liberty and that the study of property is a study of economics and
societal action,” Ackerman said.

Krier joins an illustrious list of previous recipients of the
Brigham-Kanner Prize, including Professor Frank I. Michelman of Harvard
Law School (2004), Professor Richard A. Epstein of the University of
Chicago Law School (2005), Professor James W. Ely, Jr., of Vanderbilt
Law School (2006), Professor Margaret Jane Radin of the University of
Michigan Law School (2007), Professor Robert C. Ellickson of Yale Law
School (2008), Professor Richard E. Pipes of Harvard University (2009),
Professor Carol M. Rose, University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College
of Law (2010), and most recently Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor (2011), who accepted her award during the Conference’s inaugural year abroad in Beijing, China.

Both the conference and the prize are named in recognition of Toby
Prince Brigham and Gideon Kanner for their ongoing private property
rights work, their efforts to advance the constitutional protection of
property, and their accomplishments in preserving the important role
that private property plays in protecting individual and civil rights.