For my second self-designed assignment, I want to bring in some of my legal education. Fortunately, my research this month lends itself to that effect, since one of the main sources I studied this month was Rothbard’s article on law (“Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution”). I still want to do something written, since that’s what I’m good at.
My plan is to write a judicial opinion deciding an air pollution case. The case will mostly be based on the facts of the 1970 Boomer v. Atlantic Cement Co. case at the New York Court of Appeals (New York’s highest court). The case was interesting (or disappointing) because the court set a new precedent with their ruling, breaking from the common law rules that they had established previously. So, in order to make my fake opinion as hypothetically influential as possible, I’ll be writing it as the Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, one of the best courts in the country, considering a case similar to Boomer and ultimately overturning it in defense of property rights.
This will be a little challenging because judges are not economists; the arguments that I use to decide upon the solution to this environmental problem must be legal, not economic. But, as Rothbard realized, and as I now realize, it’s nonsensical to suggest property rights as a solution to various problems without assurance that those property rights will be enforced. The purpose of this assignment is to sketch out what that enforcement might look like.
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