Looking Back: Charles Reich and His Era

Charles Reich, who died Saturday at 91, had a brief run in popular culture as author of “The Greening of America,” the bestseller that endeavored to sell the 1968 outlook to middle-class readers as the coming thing (“Consciousness III”). His reputation was to prove much more durable in the world of law, where as a young professor he penned what was to become the most cited Yale Law Journal article ever: “The New Property,” published in 1964. In it, Reich argued that courts should treat welfare benefits, public employment, and government contracts and licenses as types of property to which current holders were presumptively entitled, at least absent some sort of formal ized adversary process. The phrase “new property” invited a comparison to plain-old-property in such forms as real estate, of the rights to which the courts were (with Reich’s approval) becoming less solicitous over this same period, as in 1978’s Penn Central Transportation v. New York City, which authorized the government to take development rights without compensation.I ’ve written over the years about both sides of Reich’s work. InSchools for Misrule (2011) I explored his durably influential 1964 article at some length  as an example of academic thinking that indisputably helped to shape real-world jurisprudence. Part of its ingenuity was in couching in seemingly sober and cautious terms an idea whose implications (especially welfare rights) were otherwise controversial, so as to ap...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs