ICYMI: Cheever on Public Good and Private Magic in the Law of Land Trusts and Conservation Easements

ICYMI:

 

Federico Cheever, Public Good and Private Magic in the Law of Land Trusts and Conservation Easements: A Happy Present and a Troubled Future, 73 Denver University Law Review 1077 (1995/1996).

Below, an excerpt from the article.

The laws that provide the framework for the national environmental regulatory structure remain in a perilous and apparently perpetual reauthorization holding pattern in Congress. State legislatures appear unwilling to undertake environmental protection where the federal government no longer will. But someone establishes a new "private" land trust, committed to scenic, historic, or ecological preservation on an average of once a week. The land trust movement furthers the public good4 in ways that othermore "public" aspects of the environmental protection movement cannot because it possesses a "private magic." I use the word "magic" for its two meanings: "the art of producing illusions.., by the use of sleight of hand" and "the art of producing a desired effect or result through... techniques that presumably assure human control over supernatural agencies.' I leave to the reader whether the "private magic" of land trusts and conservation easements is simply legal sleight of hand or the "operation of some occult controlling principle of nature." (footnotes omitted).