My work in the public law of property examines how legal structures shape and sustain inequality through the governance of land, housing, and access to public and private space. In my forthcoming article, Housing Reparations (Me. L. Rev., 2025), I argue for a constitutional framework to support race-conscious municipal policies that address the long shadow of discriminatory housing practices. This builds on earlier research that interrogates the role of surveillance in public housing and the broader legal mechanisms that manage, exclude, and discipline marginalized communities under the guise of property law. Across my scholarship, I trace how regulatory and doctrinal choices—often cast as neutral—reinscribe hierarchies of race, gender, and class in spatial terms, and how property operates not simply as a system of ownership, but as a central tool of governance.
My current research continues to explore how property law can be harnessed to confront contemporary challenges, from corporate consolidation in housing markets to the quiet privatization of public infrastructure and the enduring legal legacies of racial exclusion. I am particularly interested in how doctrines like public use, equal protection, and public accommodations law can be reinterpreted to center equity and historical accountability.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Lisa Lucile Owens, [Forthcoming] Housing Reparations, Me. L. Rev. (2025).
Lisa Lucile Owens, Effective Surveillance that ‘Doesn’t Work’: Inference and Discipline in NYC Public Housing, Socius 10 (2024).
Lisa Lucile Owens, Concentrated Surveillance without Constitutional Privacy: Law, Inequality and Public Housing, 34 (1) Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev 131 (2023).
Lisa Lucile Owens, Encountering Deception in Virtual Spaces: Some Implications for Virtual Ethnography, Frontiers in Soc. (2023).
Lisa Lucile Owens, Book Review: Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era by Natali Valdez, Gender & Society (2023).
Lisa Lucile Owens, The Court of Student Excuses: Structure, Agency and the Law, TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Soc. (2023). https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/4039.
Lisa Lucile Owens, An Implausible Virtual Interview: Conversations With A Professional Research Subject, 52 Soc. Methodology 121 (2022).
Lisa Lucile Owens, Keeping the Voucher Promise: On the Emancipatory Potential of “Section 8”, 47 Critical Soc. 1043 (2021).
Lisa Lucile Owens, Justice and Warfare in Cyberspace, The Boston Review, June 22, 2015.
Saskia Sassen and Lisa Lucile Owens, The Vultures of Wall Street: The Financial Firms That Prey on Sovereign Debt, The Boston Review, October 2, 2014.
Lisa Lucile Owens, Coerced Parenthood as Family Policy: Feminism, the Moral Agency of Women, and Men’s ‘Right to Choose’, 5 Ala. C.R. & C.L. L. Rev. 1 (2013).