Juergensmeyer, Land Use Pioneer, Publishes Updated Land Use
December 3, 2007
As urban and suburban areas rapidly develop and redevelop, the field of land use law faces constant change.
And as new case law has been established and new concepts have emerged, Julian Conrad Juergensmeyer has closely monitored those changes and for decades been an authoritative voice in the field.
Juergensmeyer, the Ben F. Johnson Jr. Chair in Law, teaches land use law and co-directs the College of Law's Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth. He came to Georgia State eight years ago after teaching for 30 years at the University of Florida.
“I was an environmental law teacher too and the two fields overlap considerably,” he said. “I always intended to go to an urban area if I ever left [Gainesville, Fla.] and when I thought of leaving, I started looking for opportunities in urban areas where I could sort of live in my laboratory.
“My planning friends say that Atlanta is the fastest growing human habitation in history at least in terms of land consumption, and I think it's probably true,” he said.
Juergensmeyer is now in his 40th year of teaching land use law and has published a second edition of his leading treatise on the subject, Land Use Planning and Development Regulation Law.
The treatise, which is used by development and legal professionals tackling land use questions, was published in October, and its companion version for students was published in November. It also is available for the first time on Westlaw, publisher Thomson West's Web-based legal research service.
Within the next 12 months, Juergensmeyer expects more of his work to be published in another three books. Two are co-authored works examining impact fees and the third is a textbook to which he contributed for Europeans dealing with planning and wind farms.
He expects to have two law review articles published in the next year as well. One will be published by the University of Denver and the other by Florida State University.
“It's been a productive period for me,” he said.
The land use treatise was first published under a different title in 1971 by UCLA law professor Donald Hagman, a noted scholar in the field. Juergensmeyer was asked by Thomson West in 1982 to take over the text following Hagman's death. He put out an update in 1986 and eventually partnered on the treatise with Wake Forest law professor Thomas E. Roberts.
Updates to the treatise have been more frequent in recent years due to rapid changes in the field, Juergensmeyer said. The recently published update is the third in less than a decade.
In addition to updates on United States Supreme Court decisions, the second edition under the current title also covers new areas in transit-oriented development and conservation subdivision planning. Both planning strategies have gained popularity in recent years, especially in the rapidly developing Atlanta metro area.
“Back in the earlier editions, growth management was new,” said Juergensmeyer. “Now some of the smart growth [concepts] and the New Urbanism movement is new, and the Supreme Court of the United States has gotten much more active in this area, so we have to keep updating it more and more often.
“In the last two editions, we've rewritten major portions of the book, I think well over half each time, because of so many new approaches, new cases, and new statutes. Everything's changing so rapidly,” he said.