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106 Iowa L. Rev. 2107 (2020-2021)
The Future of Law and Transportation

handle is hein.journals/ilr106 and id is 2127 raw text is: The Future of Law and Transportation
Gregory H. Shill'
ABSTRACT: Law has played a substantial yet largely uncredited role in
shaping, and suppressing, transportation policy debates. Transportation
involves tradeoffs and competition for resources-for example, the
determination of whose homes are connected by highways and whose
destroyed. But it also involves clashes between a particular vision of comfort
and convenience-the unimpeded, fast movement of automobiles-and a
host offundamental policy goals, including public safety, racial justice, and
climate action. Because legal rules often predetermine the outcome of these
conflicts, law has the effect of codifying dubious decisions that were made
during the early days of mass automobility and placing the results beyond
ready contestation.
This first-of-its-kind Symposium endeavors to open a legal literature on the
past, present, and potential of transportation policy. The scholars who
participated eschewed the fashionable transportation technology topics of the
day and instead confronted essential and long-deferred legal policy questions.
They considered these questions through the lens of multiple substantive areas
of law, including land use, tax, traffic, vehicle design, consumer and public
finance, and state and local government-all with keen sensitivity to
economics, politics, race, and culture as reflected in the law. And in doing so,
these legal scholars were joined by colleagues from disciplines where
transportation scholarship is more established.
This Issue features an astonishing array of scholarship on the future of law
and transportation from some of today's most promising and distinguished
scholars of the nascent subject. No scholarly field can trace its founding to a
single publication, but it is hoped that this Issue will endure as a formative
volume in the field of transportation law.
We have gloated too much over the usefulness of the motor car to consider it
in its other aspects as a dangerous menace to safety. We put it into reckless
* Associate Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law; Affiliated Faculty
Member, University of Iowa College of Engineering National Advanced Driving Simulator; J.D.,
Harvard Law School; B.A., Columbia University. I wish to express my gratitude here to the Iowa
Law Review both for its willingness to host a Symposium on a subject that has not received much
attention in legal scholarship and for the extraordinary efforts of its editors in the very
challenging circumstances of an ongoing pandemic.

2107

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