Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
1987
Abstract
The reaction to Richard Epstein's Takings has been almost universally negative. Joseph Sax finds Epstein the "prisoner of an intellectual style so confining and of a philosophy so rigid that he has disabled himself from seeing problems as beyond the grasp of mere formalism." Thomas Grey concludes that "Takings belongs with the output of the constitutional lunatic fringe" and is "a travesty of constitutional scholarship." Thomas Ross, writing in this Law Review, says that, at least from an academic perspective, Takings is "a patent and howling failure." Epstein has provoked even the student editors of the Harvard Law Review, who condemn his work as "an academic exercise in its worst sense: he develops a novel interpretation of the takings clause but provides no reason to take it seriously."
Disciplines
Law | Legal Writing and Research | Property Law and Real Estate | Public Law and Legal Theory
Recommended Citation
Thomas W. Merrill,
Rent Seeking and the Compensation Principle,
80
Nw. U. L. Rev.
1561
(1987).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/372
Included in
Legal Writing and Research Commons, Property Law and Real Estate Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons
Comments
Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain by Richard A. Epstein, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. xi, 362, $25.00.