Like many Americans, I spent a lot of time during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic walking around my neighborhood for exercise, socialization, and commercial activity. I began to realize how essential the sidewalks were for everyone—not just as a way to get from place to place, but as a resource and a platform for so many other valuable uses and activities.

As a law professor, I focus in my teaching and writing on property law, constitutional law, local governments, and how those institutions and laws shape our ability to participate in civil society and to flourish as individuals and communities. It became clear to me that the sidewalk was central to this broader project, and as I looked at the literature, it became clear to me that there was an important gap I could help fill. Sociologists and historians and geographers have done really important work examining sidewalk life, but a legal perspective was missing.

I began with my core areas of expertise and interest: the property law of sidewalks. That's where I uncovered the mismatch between how sidewalk responsibilities are often allocated today (to the adjacent owner) and how property law would tell us those sidewalk responsibilities should be allocated (to the public and the government). My work on local institutions also led me to dig into the highly fragmented way in which government oversight for sidewalks manifests—as silos within an alphabet soup of agencies that often don't coordinate as well as we'd hope.

But there's even more. Sidewalks are where an extraordinary amount of landmark First Amendment law has been made—defining the contours of our rights to speak and picket and engage in political activity—and where speech and expressive conflicts continue to arise. They're also spaces where we are all heavily surveilled and policed and which are therefore central to any discussion of the Fourth Amendment and our rights to privacy.

My goal is to bring all of this to the attention of the public, scholars, and government decisionmakers: to make clear that so many areas of law and policy intersect and collide on the sidewalk. And, it turns out, most of these issues are not definitively resolved or dictated by the Constitution or by any other external body of law. Instead, they boil down to policy choices that we all get to shape as voters, advocates, and officials.

Ongoing thread. More from Michael Pollack to follow.