***SPAM*** Re: NP: Ad Coelum

[Robert Mahnke]

A few thoughts, take them as worth at least what you paid for them.

I’m not familiar with this doctrine, but if you’re thinking about it, you might also think about opposing doctrine(s).  Because flight wasn’t a thing until a century+ ago, it wasn’t an issue to be decided, but air travel would be impossible if you had to pay off every landowner whose property you crossed.  Something similar is happening with drones now.  Relatedly, I think there are states where ownership of real estate does or does not extend to some/all mineral rights below the ground, which may be a way of getting at the same issue: if the state wants to enable or encourage mining, it doesn’t want to tie up mineral rights in a way that discourages building mines.  That question might go back several centuries, at least technologically speaking,

In some places (California, for example), property owners have some sort of right to air and views which constrains neighboring property owners from building up and blocking their sun.  

Apropos of public space on an airplane, I recall reading a case in law school about an attempt to serve someone with process in an airplane 30,000 feet above some particular judicial district — the question was whether that was occurring in that judicial district or not, if they were just passing above it in a jetliner.  But I don’t remember the answer.  One way that many legal problems about which law applies on a plane get resolved is that federal law trumps state and local law (so you get one law about whether smoking is permitted in lavatories, rather than those of every city and town you fly above).

My reaction is different from Laura’s — I think no one wants a city where every building goes to a height limit and not above, and so the selling of air space is a way to let some people building taller buildings while sharing the benefits with others.  Not that real estate developers aren’t usually going to find a way to do what they want to do.

I would caution against thinking of property law as an internally coherent doctrine that says much about the public imagination.  I would more tend to think of it as a series of practical solutions, evolving in fits and starts, to problems that arise when somebody wants to do something that someone else doesn’t like.

It just wasn’t that easy to build particularly tall buildings until the very late 19th century, so I wouldn’t have thought you’d see much discussion of these problems in legal cases before that.

On the question of seeing a space as colonizable and ownable, my mind goes to Locke, fwiw.

> On Apr 14, 2017, at 8:11 AM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The concept of air rights in NYC - that a short building can sell it's "air space" to a larger building that wants to build higher than it would be allowed to - strikes me as illogical and larcenous. All hail the real estate developers!
> 
> http://www.airrightsny.com/?m=1 <http://www.airrightsny.com/?m=1>
> 
> Laura
> 
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
> 
> 
> Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hey y’all,
> 
>  
> I’m working on an essay right now that deals a little with questions of property law, specifically this ad coelum doctrine (idea that land ownership extends infinitely upward and downward), set against the larger notion of the human’s relationship to the sky, the politics of public space on an airplane, some other things…
> 
> 
> 
> If any of you have any particularly interesting/relevant information or thoughts to send my way, I’d be interested. Especially things that might shed some light on the extent to which this was actually a new idea whenever it first gets supposedly uttered (Wikipedia says some people credit a 13th century Roman scholar named Accursus), the extent to which it represents an evolution in a living person’s public understanding of property ownership/rights at the time, the details around its becoming understood embraced versus becoming officially codified in rule of law, maybe even the evolution of how a human thinks about such things like the sky, the ground, etc... (you might get the sense here I’m trying to get a sense of the human’s sense of frontiers, the way the human first sees a space and sees it as colonizable/ownable…)
> 
>  
> One thing I’m trying to understand is the spirit and political context in which this first makes its way into the public’s imagination, perhaps maybe wondering how it might be understood against/in relation to the Renaissance, what currents of change might run through them both and into—eventually—modernism, etc.
> 
>  
> Is there something kind of populist about this? At least populist relative to whoever was allowed to own land… Or if not populist then does it indicate broader humanistic trends? Or is it strictly a legalistic framework for solving obvious neighbor disputes?
> 
>  
> Bonus points if anyone has anything particularly interesting or salient to do with the mile high club, or aviatory sex in general.
> 
>  
> Thanks and lots of love. 
> 

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