Dibs
Snow Days, Institutions, and Claiming "Your" Spot
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
From the Middle West to New England, much of the eastern U.S. has been struggling under a thick blanket of snow and ice over the last week.
One result: I’ve accumulated some energy and ideas for resuming my posting here at “Everything in Between.” Some of that energy gets expressed in this post, sort of “Substack calisthenics.”
A second result: another resurgence of journalistic fascination with social practice known as “dibs” in Chicago and “space saving” in Boston and marked with “parking chairs” (and other things) in Pittsburgh: digging out your car and marking “your” empty spot with a thing that holds it until you return. A non-digger who removes the thing and parks a car there is apt to experience some vigilante justice.
Recent online reporting about the practice includes this (a local NPR report from Boston and this (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Because “Pittsburgh Parking Chair” is partly metaphor, partly an excuse for fun, and mostly an exercise in Pittsburgh exceptionalism, Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center (an excellent regional museum) got in on the action and Pittsburgh’s newly-inaugurated mayor, a young person who has to perform old Pittsburgh rituals, confirmed that Pittsburghers should “respect the chair laws, … or whatever you want to call them.” Well over a decade ago, the great (and now former) Post-Gazette editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers satirized the practice in a cartoon the embedded a fictional sign reading: “You can have my parking chair when you pry it from my cold, dead, shovel-weary fingers.” A few years ago, Harvard Law professor Michael Heller co-authored an excellent book about this aspect of property law titled, appropriately, “Mine!”
It is not going too far to suggest that one measure of “Pittsburgh” and “Pittsburgh-ness” is the extent to which someone who identifies as a “Pittsburgher” knows about and honors parking chair practice. If cities are institutions (and they are), that’s largely because they are aggregations of practices that materialize shared ideologies, histories, and symbols. “The parking chair” is as much an emblem of Pittsburgh as the Terrible Towel that Pittsburgh sports fans twirl.
To honor the moment, I am re-publishing a short essay about all of the above that I posted initially at my original blog, Pittsblog, back in 2010, in the wake of that year’s “Snowmageddon.” The piece was picked up and cited later in what I often think of the most thoughtful scholarly writing about dibs and parking chairs and the like, a journal article by the wonderful MIT social scientist Susan Silbey titled “J. Locke, op. cit.: Invocations of Law on Snowy Streets.”
Snow this week has brought out the parking chair commentariat, from Chris B. (now creator of a Pittsburgh Parking Chair page on Wikipedia) to the Post-Gazette. They're talking chairs in Baltimore and Philadephia, too.
I understand the intuition that drives people to claim "their" parking spaces. I put "their" in quotation marks, of course, because there is nothing "their" about them - the parking spaces are on public streets. There is an interesting and increasingly lively debate among economists and property theorists about whether parking-chairs-in-cleared-parking-spots amount to a legitimate form of limited, customary, property right.
The argument goes something like this:
Pro-chair (and another essay that is especially pro-chair): I cleared the spot; therefore I own the spot. And if I didn't own the spot after I cleared it, then I wouldn't have an adequate incentive to clear the spot. Moreover, the community benefits from my clearing the spot, because that's one less spot that public authorities will have to clear. And long-time community acceptance of the tradition shows that it is welfare-promoting. The pro-chair argument is simple and straightforward.
Anti-chair (that's a small-ish Facebook group) (and chair-skeptic): The anti-chair argument is long and complicated. The idea that "I built it, therefore I own it" has a sophisticated but problematic pedigree in the philosophy of John Locke. For the most part, American property law rejects Locke as a justification for property rights schemes, even informal ones. (The fact that parking spaces occupy technically "public" property is relevant but not dispositive. I can't cut down a diseased tree in Schenley Park, put a fence around the clearing, and claim that the land inside is "mine." But I can't do the same thing on my neighbor's land, either.) No one needs the incentive of ownership here to clear out parking spots; mostly, people are clearing out their own cars, which they would do anyway. "Ownership" of the spot is a kind of cherry on top of the sundae - a bonus for doing your family duty. The community suffers from parking chair claims, because people who need places to park are foreclosed from a number of possible options. The strongest argument against the chairs is that enforcement of the parking chair regime is carried out mostly by self-help, which means various forms of vandalism. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that, whether or not the local community thinks that it's OK. The pro-chair folks tend to assume that it's the *other guy's* car that gets keyed, or loses its side-view mirror, or is covered with ice. Community acceptance of the tradition doesn't show that it's welfare-promoting; instead, it shows that the community is willing to internalize the benefits and externalize the costs of private enforcement.
There is no answer in this debate. The problem is that the parking chair phenomenon has been around for so long that no one is really sure what would happen if parking chairs *weren't* allowed. Maybe everyone would clear their spots anyway, and everyone would have places to park when they come back from work or running errands. Maybe no one would clear their spots, hoarding parking spaces out of fear that they wouldn't have a place to park after work or running errands. Maybe the population of the neighborhood would turn over rapidly enough that no one remembers that the place has to follow the same rules that were in effect decades ago.
Maybe the streets would be cleared, and everyone would take the bus.
Despite the fact that the parking chair phenomenon is not unique to Pittsburgh, I've always thought that it speaks an essential truth about the region: A lot of Pittsburghers would choose to dig a giant hole and sit in it over clearing a path of parking spaces that helps other people get moving again.
This is me, in 2026, picking up the thread:
The academic in me wants to carry on the conversation with pointers to research on signaling theory (how is the meaning of a “parking chair” or equivalent item communicated to diverse observers?), to research that suggests that “things” and “objects” often have much less to do in practice with claims of “mine!” (very much a focus on individual interests) and much more to do with how communities of different scales coordinate claims to scarce resources over time and space (very much a focus on the group), and to the obvious point that “dibs” and “parking chairs” and the like inscribe and reinscribe all sorts of inclusionary and exclusionary practices, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. The sharpest critique of “dibs” is to argue that diggers and “dibs” claimers are privatizing presumptively public resources. They are, paradoxically, no less “thieves” than people who cut down trees in public parks without permission and use the wood to build furniture for themselves.
But I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll refer to the scholar and theorist Stanley Fish, who published a provocative article almost 40 years ago titled “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory” that appeared in the Yale Law Journal. Setting aside academic jargon, Fish’s basic point was that the pitcher Dennis Martinez (in the late 1980s, pitching for the Baltimore Orioles) was necessarily incapable of saying or even thinking anything “theoretical” about his pitching. Social conventions define us and define our capacity to see and experience the worlds around us; we cannot “theorize” about ourselves. Martinez just pitched, and his manager, the Orioles’ legend Earl Weaver, just told him to pitch, and neither could do more.
Fish’s argument wasn’t delivered only in that article, but the article is the one that I have always held onto as a point of reference, largely because the question that he answered - are people essentially boxed in by their situation? - was answered differently (and to my thinking, persuasively) in a rebuttal article that I have long admired, titled “‘Bull Durham and the Uses of Theory,” published by Steven Winter in the Stanford Law Review. Winter used dialogue from the movie “Bull Durham” - specifically the wise elder Kevin Costner (Crash Davis) coaching the rising star Tim Robbins (Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh) on the finer points of talking about his work - to argue, among other things, that we - meaning “each of us,” in our respective multiple contexts - have greater powers to imagine and to choose among sets of social practices and conventions than Fish, among other people, wants to admit. Choosing is rarely fully un-constrained, but choosing is possible. Choosing is a moral act, meaning (among other things) that with choices come consequences, for oneself as well as for others. That, rather than unreflective uses of language and behavior, is how institutions persist over time. As Mark Twain is alleged to have said about whether he believed in infant baptism, an entirely different institution: “Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen it done!”
In other words, formal law aside (because whatever one thinks of the practice, “dibs” and "parking chairs” clearly violate formal, public law), this is a convention that a community and its members choose, or not. It is Yoda-in-the-snow: Do. Or Do Not. There is no try.
What others have to say
Selections from new-ish commentary about the institutions of higher education and institutions of expertise, shared because these folks have me thinking, not necessarily because I agree.
Last Fall I wrote a lot about universities and higher education, and I will get back to the topic soon. Recently, I’ve enjoyed pieces at the “Finding Equilibrium” Substack (Jay Akridge and David Hummels) about leadership and higher education, partly because of what they have laid out explicitly and partly because of what they have - purposely, I hope - omitted.
I will have more to say about leadership, in higher education and otherwise. Meanwhile, my podcast about leadership recently wrapped its second 10-episode season.
My bookshelf
Like a lot of academics, I read a lot. Like a lot of law professors, I read a lot about law and about governance. But I also read a lot of things just for fun and a lot of other things because you never know where interesting ideas might come from.
My overdue report on Ann Packer, “Some Bright Nowhere” (Harper Collins, 2025) is still overdue, because the book has not arrived. As homework, I tracked down and read Packer’s first novel, “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier” (Knopf, 2002). It is elegantly written and sneakily nuanced. To me, the book delivered less via plot and more via characters. Not all of them were equally well-drawn, but more important (to me), the characters that the reader wanted to like were not always so likeable and the characters that the reader wanted to resist sometimes surprised in good ways. Sort of like, you know, life.
Meanwhile, I read Sven Beckert’s “Capitalism: A Global History” (Penguin, 2025), one of the most celebrated nonfiction books of 2025 and a doorstop of a sweep through several centuries of business-meets-geography-meets-power-and-the-state. I found it equal parts impressive and maddening, impressive in the way that historians and economists at elite universities simply assume the power to restate and interpret massive swaths of human experience and maddening in the way that Beckert’s argument mostly marginalizes the role of human imagination at both individual and collective scales. But I have spent most of my career thinking about and writing about invention and innovation, so perhaps my reaction is simply to be expected.
In any event: the calisthenics are done, for now.
Thanks for sticking with me..