66 CBJ 466. BOOK REVIEWS CONNECTICUT LAND USE REGULATION, Second Edition, TERRY J. TONDIRO, The Atlantic Law Book Company, 1992.820 pp. text, appendices and index, $125.00.

AuthorTIMOTHY S. HOLLISTER*

Connecticut Bar Journal

Volume 66.

66 CBJ 466.

BOOK REVIEWS CONNECTICUT LAND USE REGULATION, Second Edition, TERRY J. TONDIRO, The Atlantic Law Book Company, 1992.820 pp. text, appendices and index, $125.00

466BOOK REVIEWS CONNECTICUT LAND USE REGULATION, Second Edition, TERRY J. TONDIRO, The Atlantic Law Book Company, 1992.820 pp. text, appendices and index, $125.00.Professor Terry Tondro's Second Edition of Connecticut Land Use Regulation is an excellent book, a comprehensive and readable exposition of Connecticut law. It is also an important book.

Land use regulation, which forms the heart of society's attempts to create and control the physical component of our quality of life, is often forged amid contentious public proceedings where the stakes for the participants are high. Governmental restrictions on private property rights, put at risk property values and the assumptions that underlie them; they often pit that widely reviled group, developers, against neighborhoods; and in Connecticut, to a degree unique in the United States, they place final legislative authority in the hands of local commissions staffed by volunteers. The system asks these decisionmakers to interpret constitutional provisions, statutes, and ordinances, and to apply them to complex expert and factual testimony. (This also tends to occur in the evening, after these volunteers have spent a full day making a living.)

Given these circumstances, a comprehensive and disinterested analysis of the law of land use is bound to be regarded as something of an oracle, and, indeed, this appears to be what the first edition of Professor Tondro's book has become at land use proceedings in Connecticut. The prior version was probably in someone's hand at every major land use public hearing in Connecticut during the past several years, and thus we can expect this new, enlarged, and improved edition to attain an even greater status.(fn1)

The first edition, published in 1979 and supplemented in 1983, had the feel and appearance of an extended law review article. The new work, by any measure, is a treatise. It is nearly double the length of

467the first edition, and is far more comprehensive in its description and analysis of the judicial and statutory development of the current law.

The book is organized into eight substantive chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the scope of the...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT