Until July 29, you and every other citizen of Illinois owned equal shares in a 30-acre parcel of real estate near 6500 north, 900 west. That’s at the bottom of Lake Michigan, just east of Loyola University’s lakeshore campus. But you don’t own it anymore. That afternoon, Governor James Thompson signed a bill authorizing the sale of the land to Loyola for $10,000, so that the university can fill 18 1/2 acres of it, expanding its campus by about a third.
Loyola’s proposal has cleared its biggest hurdle by winning overwhelming approval in the state legislature. But the university still must convince five agencies that its idea is good for the lake and for the city: the Chicago City Council, the Chicago Plan Commission (which administers the lakefront protection ordinance), the Chicago Park District, the Illinois Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
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(Whatever its other merits, the public trust doctrine is in some ways a lawyer’s dream–it offers endless possibilities for argument. Unlike, say, the First Amendment–which itself supports a good-sized cottage industry–the public trust doctrine is not embodied in a fixed, definitive text. It is instead the ever-changing sum of generations of court decisions, in which judges have modified almost every nuance, like a gang of indefatigable tailors endlessly altering one garment.)
In 1892, the supreme court declared the state the winner–sort of. It owned the lakebed, all right, but it wasn’t free to do anything it wanted with it–like, say, auction it off to the highest bidder. The state’s title, said the court, “is a title held in trust for the people of the state, that they may enjoy the navigation of the waters, carry on commerce over them, and have liberty of fishing therein, freed from the obstruction or interference of private parties. . . . The state can no more abdicate its trust over property in which the whole people are interested, . . . than it can abdicate its police powers in the administration of government and the preservation of the peace.”
(3) 1.7 acres of its completed lakefill to the Chicago Park District as an addition to the beach at Hartigan Park, just north of the campus;
