Barry Shanoff

When grownups think of property in an everyday sense, we reflect on or fixate on an object – a car, a tennis racket, a cellphone – and a relationship some person has to it.  Not necessarily ourselves. 

The Alabama couple said the attack on their home was unrelenting. They did their best to cope with it. The assailants: noise, odors, debris and scavenger birds that made it hard to breathe, sleep and generally live a...

This month we examine a county’s commitment, which, although reconfirmed periodically, turned out years later to be inconvenient.  Local officials unsuccessfully tried to backtrack on it. 

“I’m not interested in closure,” said writer, actor and television producer Larry David.  “Some people have heart attacks and die, right?  There’s no closure.” In line with his cranky persona, he was deprecating the...

Calling conditions in her yard “a hodgepodge of furniture pieces and a mishmash of trash and debris . . .  a collection that only grew despite efforts to convince her to clean [it] up,” an Ohio appeals court upheld...

Canyon County, Idaho, is situated along the picturesque Snake River, about 25 miles west of the capital city of Boise.  Migrant wagon trains passed through the area in the 19th Century on the Oregon Trail.  The county...

Is it reasonable to expect that when a local government assesses its residents and businesses for specific government services, the funds it collects will actually be used for such purposes?  For those who have paid...

Californians are laid back, right?  Maybe not when they’re reacting to noise from trash collection.  Last month we looked at an early morning racket at a restaurant in Los Angeles.  It drove a nearby resident to file...