In Blights Out and Property Rights in New Orleans Post-Katrina, Yxta Murray will work to enrich the law of property with the insights of the arts collective Blights Out, which engages a multi-pronged critique of the violent redistribution of New Orleans property. Her article will offer the insights and arguments of Blights Out to contemporary mainstream legal culture and will argue that their conception of property, dignity, and human rights should radically restructure the meaning of a provision in the Fifth Amendment known as the Takings Clause.
Yxta Murray is Chicana law professor, fiction writer, and arts writer. She holds a BA in English from UCLA and a law degree from Stanford. She has clerked for Judge Harry Hupp on the Central District of California and for Ferdinand F. Fernandez on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is tenured faculty at Loyola Law School. Her scholarship is in the fields of property law and criminal law, and she is committed to writing about anti-poverty, anti-violence, anti-inequality, and anti-discriminatory engagements. Her art-law efforts have led her to write about Wangechi Mutu, Rafa Esparza, Sanja Iveković, Marina Abramović, Carrie Mae Weems, and other artists who address human problems the law makes rules about. She has published six novels, and in 1999 won a Whiting Award. She has stories in or forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Georgia Review, the Santa Monica Review, the Chicago Review, the Cincinnati Review, Joyland, and others. She also writes art criticism for Artillery Magazine, Aperture, and Aperture Online, among other journals. Her one-act play, Advice and Consent, which addresses the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is forthcoming from LARB the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2019.