Daniel B. Rosenbaum
Assistant Professor | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Daniel B. Rosenbaum's research explores how local institutions function, evolve, and interact with each other under state oversight.
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Biography
Daniel B. Rosenbaum is an assistant professor at Michigan State University College of Law, where he teaches Local Government, Property, and the Local Government Policy Lab. His research explores how local institutions function, evolve, and interact with each other against a backdrop of opaque or inconsistent state oversight. Professor Rosenbaum employs public records requests, interviews, empirical methods, and geospatial tools to understand and distill the operations of under-the-radar local institutions ranging from land banks to airport authorities to parks departments. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Indiana Law Journal, University of Richmond Law Review, Buffalo Law Review, and Marquette Law Review.
Prior to joining MSU Law, Professor Rosenbaum spent two years as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, where he taught Property, Estates & Trusts, and Local Government and was appointed editor-in-chief of the Michigan Real Property Law Review, a position he still holds. Professor Rosenbaum entered academia after serving as executive director of a public authority that managed distressed property in the Detroit region and advised local municipalities on issues of divestment, land ownership, and development. A native of Chicago, Illinois, Professor Rosenbaum earned a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Areas of Expertise (2)
Municipal Law
State Law
Accomplishments (1)
Dean’s Scholar Prize in “Revitalizing America’s Cities” (professional)
2015
Education (2)
Harvard Law School: J.D. 2015
Washington University in St. Louis: B.A., History 2011
Affiliations (2)
- Michigan Real Property Law Review : Editor-in-Chief
- Association for Urban Legal Scholars
Links (1)
News (5)
Should East Lansing voters approve an expansion of the City Council?
WKAR News online
2023-10-20
“Local governments are very resource constrained, so when you have more people, your costs will usually go up,” said Daniel Rosenbaum, an assistant professor at Michigan State University’s law school. "As your costs go up, you might see constraints in other areas of the government."
Four Tax Cases Before the Supreme Court to Watch This Fall
Bloomberg Law online
2023-09-27
A petition in another federal tax case deals with the timing for filing partnership petitions with the IRS. Meanwhile, two state petitions seek the court’s eye on the constitutionality of Washington state’s new tax on capital gains and a Michigan tax sale statute. Here’s what tax practitioners should look out for this term.
County officials take aim at Michigan’s red flag law
WKAR News online
2023-06-29
Daniel Rosenbaum is an assistant professor at the Michigan State University College of Law. He said it's difficult to answer whether red flag laws are definitively unconstitutional because he called the Second Amendment "an evolving doctrine." He noted some federal courts have upheld the laws but added the legal process could provide further certainty.
Lansing Township plans legal action against Ingham County clerk over annexation proposal
WKAR News online
2022-08-25
Daniel Rosenbaum is a professor of local government law at Michigan State University. He says the ballot proposal will probably still go forward.
State vs. schools: Legal confusion delays mask wearing resolutions in some districts
WXYZ News tv
2021-11-20
“This is a mess. This is a definite muddle,” said Daniel Rosenbaum, a visiting assistant professor at University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.
Event Appearances (3)
“State Audit, Local Policy”
October 2023 | Chicagoland Junior Scholars Conference
“State Audit, Local Policy”
May 2023 | International and Comparative Urban Law Conference
“The Local Lawmaking Loophole”
May 2023 | Association of Law, Property, and Society
Journal Articles (5)
The Local Lawmaking Loophole
The Yale Law Journal2024 Local governments contract with each other for a wide variety of purposes: to deliver services, administer grant money, coordinate emergency responses, and manage infrastructure projects. These interlocal agreements (ILAs) have been embraced by local officials keen to forge administrative efficiencies in an environment of limited resources. By contracting with neighboring and overlapping governments, a local entity can draw upon funding and technical skills that it does not otherwise possess alone, operating in theory to the ultimate benefit of residents across its region.
Interlocal Power Roulette
99 Indiana Law Journal2024 Local governments inhabit a crowded ecosystem. Cities, counties, and school districts—and many more—share overlapping territorial jurisdictions. Overlapping jurisdiction goes hand-in-hand with redundant local power, defined as a scenario where multiple governments hold independent authority to take the exact same action in the exact same territorial space. In Maine, for example, state law empowers three local bodies to operate the same sewer infrastructure. In Detroit, two separate entities are equally tasked with managing the city’s streetlights. And in communities across the country, local governments are broadly authorized to own the same parcels of public land, including in Oakland, California, where public properties are splintered between a grand total of fifteen different government bodies.
A Legal Map of New Local Parkland
Marquette Law Review2022 Public parks play consequential roles in local communities. Parks can raise property values, encourage or inhibit sprawl, and promote health, safety, and social cohesion. The decision to create a park affects development in the surrounding area and dictates which residents can easily access the property’s new amenities—and which residents cannot. Yet, public stakeholders are given few signposts in making and monitoring public park acquisitions. Data on new parkland is scarce; moreover, the legal framework undergirding the process is poorly understood and rarely explored, particularly at the local government level. Although local governments are America’s leading stewards and gatekeepers of public park property, the actions of a parks department when acquiring new land receive bare direction from the formal legal regime and little attention from legal scholars.
Reforming Local Property for an Era of National Decline
Buffalo Law Review2022 Following a century of rapid growth, the global human population is predicted to crest and then decline in the coming generations. Some industrialized countries are already grappling with the economic and societal consequences of population loss. Others, including the United States, have only started to realize that decline might arrive on their doorsteps far sooner than originally anticipated, a prospect for which policymakers and legal scholars are presently unprepared. Global and national demographic change threaten to cause far-reaching dislocations, and local municipalities, too, will be asked to reckon with the aftermath. Yet local governance in the United States has long followed a dominant vision of population growth, with decline left stigmatized as a regional anomaly—as a symptom of crisis rather than a discrete catalyst for it. The growth gospel prevents local officials from preparing for decline preemptively when the resources can still be mustered to confront shifting demographics and dwindling tax streams.
Confronting the Local Land Checkerboard
University of Richmond Law Review,2022 Fractured public land is hidden in plain sight. In communities across the country, a patchwork assortment of local governments share splintered ownership over surplus public properties, which can be found scattered in residential neighborhoods and alongside highways, in the shadows of development projects and in the scars of urban renewal. The ripple effect of this fragmentation extends across the spectrum of local governance. It creates needless costs and bureaucratic headaches at a time of acute fiscal distress for cities and counties. It contributes to an inequitable imbalance of local power between formal and informal landowners in a community. And curiously, the operative legal regime enables the problem while simultaneously muddying pragmatic ways to confront it. This Article seeks to shed light upon the local land checkerboard— and in doing so, the cluttered and opaque world of local government law that it inhabits
