Real Estate & Property Law

Property Casebooks: and Pricing Issues

Posted on September 24, 2010
Thanks to the Property Prof gurus (including my marvelous colleague Al Brophy) for inviting me to post here. From Al's post, you may know that I hope to address teaching and learning issues, based in part on my experience working...

When The Star of David Doesn't "Comply" with a Historic District

Posted on September 24, 2010
A Hasidic groups alleges discrimination over its plans to renovate a historic building in Litchfield, Connecticut: This summer, a federal judge ruled that sufficient evidence of "discrimination against Jewish people" may exist, warranting a trial over the Borough of Litchfield's...

Korngold on Globalizing Conservation Easements

Posted on September 23, 2010
Gerald Korngold (New York Law School) has posted Globalizing Conservation Easements: Private Law Approaches for International Environmental Protection on SSRN. Here's the abstract: For the past thirty years nonprofit organizations have revolutionized open space and habitat conservation in the United...

The Future of Property

Posted on September 23, 2010
Here's an amazing slideshow of Chongqing, the largest city that you've never heard of. And here's an excerpt of a Foreign Policy article on the changes in China' western region: These are good times indeed for Chongqing, home to 32...

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Wegner Visiting With Us

Posted on September 23, 2010
I'm delighted to announce that my beloved colleague Judith Wegner will be sitting with us for a spell. Judith was dean here at UNC for a decade and more recently was principal investigator on the Carnegie Foundation's major study on...

A Squatter in the Empire State Building

Posted on September 22, 2010
There is a short article in yesterday's New York Times that provides an interesting landlord/tenant issue for students to unravel. Landlord leased an office suite in the Empire State Building to a mortgage broker. Mortgage broker (apparently contrary to the...

Property Rights and Neighbors

Posted on September 21, 2010
For better or worse, I tend to be confrontation-averse. But five minutes ago, I had a brief, unpleasant interaction with a neighbor over a little property rights issue -- and what's worse, an issue I wouldn't care about, except that...

Destoying Black Property = Commemorating Civil Rights

Posted on September 20, 2010
Slate highlights a property-rights story coming out of Montgomery, Alabama: Over the last decade or so, dozens?perhaps hundreds?of homes in Montgomery have been declared blighted and razed . . . The owners tend to be disproportionately poor and black, and...

The Strange, Utopian Quest for a Workable Bikeshare Program

Posted on September 17, 2010
Two years ago the ?Smartbike? program launched in Washington, D.C. By all accounts, Smartbike has been an unqualified disaster. No one bothered to promote the program, only long-term memberships were offered (freezing out tourists), and there weren?t many places that...

Between Kitsch and the Sublime

Posted on September 15, 2010
A meditation on the World's Largest Ball of Twine and the other enormous things that dot the American Landscape: If size and apparent uselessness can make otherwise ordinary things seem extraordinary, so too does location. America?s largest things are typically...

Lovett on Land Reform in Scotland

Posted on September 14, 2010
John A. Lovett (Loyola New Orleans) has posted Progressive Property in Action: The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 on SSRN. Here's the abstract: This article responds to a material deficit at the heart of American property law scholarship. For years,...

The Social Building

Posted on September 13, 2010
My favorite article from the past week asks why the residents of certain apartment buildings in New York behave in a more neighborly fashion than the tenants of other, similar buildings: Despite the common perception that New York apartment living...

Mapping Segregation

Posted on September 12, 2010
On his radicalcartography blog, Bill Rankin has mapped Chicago by racial/ethnic group and produced a map showing stark segregation. You can find his map here. Inspired by Rankin's project, my friend Eric Fisher has produced maps using the same methodology...

What's In Your Yard?

Posted on September 12, 2010
Teaching the law of servitudes, and in particular the ubiquitous case of Van Sandt v. Royster, often brings both my students and myself to the startlingly abrupt realization that we have no idea what's buried in our yards -- although...

Ray Brescia on Income Inequality and the Financial Crisis

Posted on September 11, 2010
Ray Brescia (Albany) has posted a very interesting article on SSRN entitled The Cost of Inequality: Social Distance, Predatory Conduct and the Financial Crisis, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the N.Y.U. Annual Survey of American Law....

The Opposite of Bonsai

Posted on September 09, 2010
David Alvand believes in strong private property rights. If nothing else, he is a man that would make Blackstone proud. For example, he took a dispute over a wall in his backyard all the way to the European Court of...

Further Thoughts on the Judicial Takings Standard

Posted on September 08, 2010
As I mentioned in a prior post, I am working on an article on Judicial Takings after Stop the Beach. In that prior post, I discussed the private-private v. private-public distinction and its significance for judicial and regulatory takings. In...

Trompe l'oeil

Posted on September 07, 2010
The problem of abandoned homes is an increasingly serious policy issue in both urban and suburban settings. Vacant buildings act as a beacon for drugs, prostitution, arson, and other human ills. A judge in Cleveland as a low cost solution:...

What, If Anything, Do We Do Now?

Posted on September 05, 2010
Home values continue to drop. The market for existing stock is at a standstill, and tens of thousands of new foreclosures have yet to enter it anyway. More and more homeowners -- including boringly responsible ones, like yours truly --...

A toast to labor day

Posted on September 03, 2010
In honor of the long weekend, it's time to think about alcohol. Sometime last year PropertyProf's put out a call for the best name for a property-themed cocktail. The University of Detroit Mercy's Julia Belian came up with the glorious...

Order Without Law?

Posted on September 03, 2010
What happens when someone continually and flagrantly violates unwritten social norms? Nyjer Morgan of the Washington Nationals baseball team seems poised to find out. Steve Clowney

David v. Goliath?

Posted on September 02, 2010
Great stuff in the New York Times this week. Picking up on an earlier article in the Guardian, the Times does some digging on a controversy over who owns Michelangelo's David. As the article states, for 500 years David as...

Distinguishing Between Private-Public and Private-Private Transfers in Judicial and Regulatory Takings

Posted on September 01, 2010
I've been working on a fairly lengthy post-Stop the Beach article on judicial takings. I will probably post the article on SSRN in a week or so. In the meantime, I wanted to blog about a distinction that is at...

Couchsurfing 101

Posted on August 31, 2010
Last week, the LA Times ran a short Q&A about how to get rid of a freeloading house guest. According to the author of the piece: An adult living in a rental property without paying rent or being party to...

Integrating Lawyering Skills in the Property Classroom

Posted on August 31, 2010
I've been following the debate over on Prawfs Blawg regarding Bruce Newton's paper entitled "Preaching What They Don't Practice: Why Law Faculties' Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy...

Personhood, Property and Pamphlets

Posted on August 29, 2010
The New York Times is running an interesting story about an online collection of real estate pamphlets, curated and displayed by Columbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. The collection includes pamphlets from as long ago as the 1880s...

Bayern's Conveyance Interpreter

Posted on August 29, 2010
I've been worried for some time about computers taking over; here's more evidence of it.... Shawn Bayern of Florida State University has a web program that is a "conveyance interpreter" that diagrams grants of estates ("To A for life, but...

A Poem for Friday

Posted on August 27, 2010
As two of my co-bloggers on this site have academic interests in cemeteries (see: here, here, here, and here), I can't resist linking to this excellent poem (and reading) from Billy Collins, poet laureate of United States: Cemetery Ride, by...

Litigating Takings Conference at UC Berkeley

Posted on August 26, 2010
From John Echeverria (Vermont) On November 5, 2010, the 13th Annual Conference on Litigating Takings Challenges to Land Use and Environmental Regulations will be held at Berkeley Law in Berkeley, California. This year?s conference, sponsored by Vermont Law School, Georgetown...

A Fight in the Negev

Posted on August 26, 2010
The New York Times details a land dispute between the Bedouins of the Negev Desert and the Israeli government: The contest over this small patch of desert reflects a clash of cultures, of modern and traditional lifestyles and laws of...

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