Featured Faculty: Daniel Kelly
Associate Professor of Law
Not many professors look to Disney World for academic inspiration, but that’s just what Notre Dame Associate Professor of Law Daniel B. Kelly did. A scholar in property law and land use planning, Kelly reviewed examples of how real estate developers and other private parties acquire land without the use of eminent domain for his 3L paper at Harvard Law School; among those studied were Disney, which purchased thousands of acres for its theme park in Orlando, and Harvard itself, which recently bought fourteen parcels to expand its campus. Kelly won the Olin Prize in law and economics for his paper and continues to pursue scholarship in this area.
Kelly attended the University of Notre Dame as an undergrad and received his law degree from Harvard in 2005. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Richard C. Wesley on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced for a year at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City. During the past two years, he was an Olin Research Fellow at Yale Law School and a Considine Research Fellow in Law and Economics and Lecturer on Law at Harvard.
Professor Kelly began teaching at Notre Dame Law School this fall. “I wanted to work at a law school that takes scholarship seriously, but is also dedicated to teaching and mentoring students,” says Kelly. “Notre Dame excels in those areas, and it also possesses certain intangibles that are second-to-none: the cooperation among colleagues, the interaction between faculty and students, and the sense of shared purpose that drives the law school as an institution—these can’t be measured but mean a lot to my family and to me.”
In addition to property and land use, Kelly’s research and teaching interests include natural resources law, trusts and estates, and law and economics. His current projects explore the effectiveness of eminent domain, secret buying agents, and other mechanisms for assembling land as well as the problem of “strategic spillovers,” the opportunistic use of property to harm others in order to extract payments in exchange for desisting.
For more on Professor Kelly, including his CV and selected scholarship, visit his faculty profile page.
