Tribute to Carol Rose

Abstract

It is a great honor to be asked to pay tribute to Carol Rose, whose work has been critically important to my own scholarship and to that of so many of my peers. Carol has been an inspiration to several generations of scholars, not only because of the many keen insights she has contributed to several different fields of law, but also, perhaps especially, because of her style of thinking, writing, and working with other scholars. Carol's modesty, her incredible ability to cut right to the heart of the matter in the most down-to-earth, but always amazingly well-turned phrase, and her generosity to other scholars are models of what a more engaged, more honest, and more gracious scholarly community could be.

Carol likes to organize things in lists-her articles include a dozen propositions on property and takings, seven arguments on property, and so on. I am going to offer, then, a list of the top three reasons that Carol's contributions to the "vastly overwritten" takings literature, to use her phrase, are genuine advances of a very special sort. In the hope of spurring Carol to develop her contributions into a more comprehensive theory about how to ensure that government acts efficiently and fairly when regulating property, I am then going to propose the outline for what I hope will be her book on takings.