Eminent domain for economic development is both attractive and appalling. States need the power to condemn because so much land in America is inefficiently fragmented. But public land assembly provokes hostility because vulnerable communities get bulldozed. Courts offer no help. The academic literature is a muddle. Is it possible to assemble land without harming the poor and powerless? Yes. This Article proposes the creation of Land Assembly Districts, or “LADs.” This new property form solves the age-old tensions in eminent domain and shows, more generally, how careful redesign of property rights can enhance both welfare and fairness. The economic and moral intuition underlying LADs is simple: when the only justification for assembly is over-fragmentation of land, neighbors should be able to decide collectively whether their land will be assembled. Our legal theory solution is equally simple: use property law to retrofit communities with a condominium-like structure tailored to land assembly. Let's try giving those burdened by condemnation a way to share in its benefits and to veto projects they decide are not worth their while.

Chinese local governments have taken many rural lands in order to promote urbanization and modernization of the local rural areas, which, unfortunately, has given rise to many social conflicts. The current Chinese land taking laws have provided some guidance on the use of taking power, including the public interest requirement and the compensation requirement. However, these requirements are still insufficient. As can be observed from a series of cases, the fragmented ownership of rural residents caused a problem of anticommons, leading to huge transaction costs in the negotiation between governments and villagers. The mechanism of Land Assembly Districts, proposed by Professor Michael Heller and Ricks Hills, might be an effective way to handle this problem, since it can produce a relatively fair compensation for villagers, facilitate dialogue and communication, and prevent opportunism. This article considers the possibility of adopting this proposal by allowing the village committee to act collectively to negotiate the level of compensation with the Chinese local governments. This approach might effectively resolve numerous conflicts that arose in Chinese land taking events. The article also addresses the potential concern that the collective action might infringe upon the property rights of some dissenting villagers, from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

In this book, the authors argue for instigated property exchange--a concept applied in a land-assembly method commonly known in the literature as land readjustment.