Property and Power: Hartog on the Legal History of New York City

Abstract

Hendrik Hartog's Public Property and Private Power describes the conceptual (at 14) that radically altered the legal status and powers of the city of New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to this interesting and well-written account, the legal doctrines that affected New York City changed over a 140-year period in two significant ways. First, the legal system fractured the originally close connection between the city's ownership and its power. Although in the eighteenth century the city was a corporation whose property and governmental rights were blurred and mixed (at 21), in the nineteenth century it was stripped of its ability to use its ownership of as a tool of governance. Second, the eighteenth-century conception of the city as neither a nor a entity was replaced with an understanding of it as a public corporation whose powers were significantly different from those of private business corporations. Thus Professor Hartog describes the transformation of the city's legal status in terms of two pairs of legal concepts: and power, and and private. Professor Hartog organizes his account of the changing legal status of the city into three periods: the eighteenth century, the early nineteenth century, and the mid-nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, he tells us, the City of New York was not characterized as a public as distinguished from a private corporation because no such general conceptual categories of corporations existed. Instead, every corporation, including the city, was viewed as a unique institution whose powers were understandable only in terms of the specific charter granted it by the state. The most important of New York