E.I. White Chair and Distinguished Professor of Law Robin Paul Malloy was recently a Senior Visiting Fellow and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Palermo, Sicily, during the spring term. While there conducting research, Malloy delivered several guest lectures at the University of Palermo Department of Economics and Law Department and at the University of Pisa Department of Law and Jurisprudence.
At Pisa, he lectured on “Accessible Communities: Disability and the Economics of Accessibility.” Malloy notes, “When it comes to the built environment, accessibility becomes a complex matter. On the one hand, disability law, based on federal civil rights law, prohibits discrimination as people move through the places and spaces of public life. On the other hand, regulation of property and the built environment is generally a matter of state law and the exercise of the state police power that is used to regulate land use and zoning. Making buildings, sidewalks, streetscapes, and other structures accessible involves building and land regulation. This means that disability, when it is understood as enhancing accessibility to our built environment, must be approached as a regulatory matter as well as a civil rights matter. This makes accessibility planning difficult because it must respond to two very different areas of the law. As a regulatory matter, disability is made even more complex because accessibility is a mixed market good. This means that it is both a public and private market good. Moreover, accessibility infrastructure is expensive, and many market factors contribute to its underproduction.
In the lecture, Malloy focused on some of the primary market factors that need to be considered in accessibility planning and argued that good decision-making must account for resource and market constraints.
At Palermo, he gave several lectures, including “Property in a Market Context.” Malloy discussed some of the ways that markets inform our conceptions of property, and at the same time property influences the market process of exchange. “It is all part of the co-evolution of law, economics, and politics,” said Malloy.
He also delivered a lecture on “Disability and the Economics of Accessibility” in the law department at Palermo.
“I want to thank all the faculty and students at Palermo and Pisa for their intellectual and cultural exchange. I enjoyed all our conversations and look to incorporate new ideas into my future scholarship,” said Malloy.