ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the concept of "urban" in law across all of the dimensions. It explains that "urban" can be a distinctive category or taxonomical grounding for certain rights and legal obligations. The chapter then explores the ways in which urban conditions influence legal evolution. It turns to show how legal scholars have engaged both of these intersections, tracing the roots, decline, and potential revival of "urban law" as a sub-discipline in legal scholarship. The chapter demonstrates that developing a clearly recognized field of urban law can be an interdisciplinary bridge. Urban phenomena have left tell-tale traces throughout doctrines as disparate as landlord–tenant law, servitudes, nuisance, and even the federal constitutional law of property. Nuisance law seeks to address conflicts between land owners, generally setting some community standard about acceptable uses of property. In the United States, cities have formed the background for some of the most influential cases in the constitutional law of property.
