A "legal construct" is a thing that law confers or creates.
In many ways, our places are legal constructs - shaped, created, protected, or eliminated by law. The Legal Constructs Lab investigates law’s profound influence on place, through an interdisciplinary approach that spans legal and spatial analysis, as well as quantitative and qualitative methods.
Projects and publications focus on land use and historic preservation law, and also explore energy, environmental, transportation, and state and local government laws whose impact on place may be less obvious. We directly collaborate with a wide range of academic, nonprofit, governmental, and private partners, and we initiate meaningful engagement with the broader public about our ideas and research.
The National Zoning Atlas is an ongoing, multi-disciplinary, cross-institutional effort to translate and standardize the country’s zoning codes into a single online resource. Prior to arriving at Cornell, Professor Bronin created the Connecticut Zoning Atlas, for which she developed the methods and research framework used to build the rest of the country. The Atlas, administered by an independent nonprofit, now covers thousands of jurisdictions where over 115 million Americans live.
Historic preservation law encompasses many topics, from urban revitalization to Native American cultural sites to international heritage, which are vital to contemporary practice in property, land use, and real estate law. This casebook is the second edition of the first comprehensive set of teaching materials for this fascinating and increasingly important area of law.
Leaders of the Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont teams for the National Zoning Atlas talked about their teams' work and findings during a full-house presentation at the 2023 American Planning Conference. Over fifty institutions have joined the Atlas research collaborative, working diligently to collect housing-related regulatory information from the approximately 30,000 jurisdictions in the US with zoning codes.
Contact
Sara C. Bronin
Professor, AAP
Associate Faculty, Law
Website | Publications
sara.bronin@cornell.edu
Address
Legal Constructs Lab
129 Sibley Dome
Cornell College of Architecture, Art, & Planning
Ithaca, NY 14853
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