Law Commons^™

Closing The Book On The School Trust Lands, C. Maison Heidelberg

Vanderbilt Law Review

Public education in the United States faces a crisis. Financially strapped state and local governments find funding more and more difficult to supply; as a result, the quality of public education suffers. Predictably citizens are concerned, yet they resist paying increased taxes to meet the rising costs.

School trust lands provide one potential source of extra revenue. Though their existence is not well known, these lands are tremendous assets held by most states other than the original thirteen. In general, they have produced significant amounts of revenue for public education, yet historically state management of the lands has been marred …

Property And Liberty Reconsidered, Herman Belz

Vanderbilt Law Review

This perceptive, lucid, and sympathetic account of property rights in American constitutional law by Professor James W. Ely, Jr., is further evidence of the conservative challenge to liberal orthodoxy that has emerged in recent years in American historiography. That the book appears under the cosponsorship of the Organization of American Historians, one of the more militantly liberal scholarly associations in the United States, is a small but significant sign of the changing intellectual climate.

As conceived of in contemporary liberal historiography, protection of individual property rights is but one element of economic liberty. Equally if not more important, according to …

Refining The Itemized Deduction For Home Property Tax Payments, J. B. Mccombs

Vanderbilt Law Review

By enacting a $1 million debt limit for deductible home mortgage interest in 1987,' Congress opened the way for a fresh inquiry into the home property tax deduction. Adoption of that debt limit reflects a major change in policy-a re-evaluation of the benefits and costs of subsidies to luxury housing.

At first glance a $1 million limit seems ridiculously high if the debt ceiling reflects a decision to stop subsidizing luxury housing. The debt ceiling, however, does not contain an inflation adjustment provision. Because such provisions are common in the Internal Revenue Code, the absence here must be by conscious …

The Law Of Easements And Licenses In Land: Book Review, R. H. Helmholz

Vanderbilt Law Review

A distinguished commentator, Professor A.W.B. Simpson, recently observed that the legal treatise seems to be going the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird.' To him, and indeed to other thoughtful ob-servers, the treatise's characteristic form appears to have outlived its natural span, or at least lost its reason for existence among serious academic writers. The treatise's focus on a particular and specialized area of the law and its inevitable concentration on the doctrinal analysis of appellate cases now appear quite out of date to these observers, something perhaps worthwhile in a simpler and more complacent era, but which …

The Unwarranted Implication Of A Warranty Of Fitness In Commercial Leases-An Alternative Approach, Fred W. Bopp, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

The classical landlord-tenant relationship has undergone a substantial transformation since its origin in feudal England. The most recent and far-reaching change has been the emergence of an implied warranty of habitability in residential leases.' An overwhelming majority of jurisdictions recognizes this implied warranty either by statute or judicial decisions or both. These same jurisdictions, however, uniformly have rejected an extension of the underlying rationale to the commercial setting by refusing to imply an analogous warranty of fitness or suitability in nonresidential leases. Consequently, while modern notions of consumer protection have made rapid advances in residential tenancies, commercial lease law continues …

Freeing Mortgages Of Merger, Ann M. Burkhart

Vanderbilt Law Review

Change in real property law often occurs with glacial speed.This rate of change in part reflects the normal inertia of established law. A more complete explanation, however, is the innate conservatism connected to a commodity that once was the primary source of wealth and power. That this conservatism is innate should not prevent application of Ockham's razor as needed. The relationship of the doctrine of merger to the burgeoning law of mortgages is one such area. "If the law has to bear these medieval shackles the time surely has come to examine them carefully. They may have rusted away."

The …

Mining With Mr. Justice Holmes, E. F. Roberts

Vanderbilt Law Review

All of us are probably familiar with the notion that the owner of mineral rights may owe some duty of care to support the owner of the fee in his or her surface use of the land. This principle results in a binary system (the surface estate and the right of sup-port) that can be treated easily in tort law. In Pennsylvania the coal companies had owned vast areas of land. The companies had sold much of this land, reserving not only the coal, but "the right to. ..remove the same without incurring in any way liability for any damage …

The Easement In Gross Revisited: Transferability And Divisibility Since 1945, Alan D. Hegi

Vanderbilt Law Review

Courts have disagreed about the nature, obligations, and privileges that accompany the easement in gross. Generally, an easement is an interest in land which gives the easement holder the right to use that land for a specific purpose, free from the will of the landowner. An easement is in gross when the benefit from the use of another's land inures to the easement holder personally, rather than to the holder's land. The land that is subject to the holder's right of use is the servient tenement. Courts agree on these basic principles of an easement in gross, but have disagreed …

Fraudulent Conveyance Law And Its Proper Domain, Douglas G. Baird, Thomas H. Jackson

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1571 Parliament passed a statute making illegal and void any transfer made for the purpose of hindering, delaying, or defrauding creditors.' This law, commonly known as the Statute of Elizabeth, was intended to curb what was thought to be a wide-spread abuse. Until the seventeenth century, England had certain sanctuaries into which the King's writ could not enter. A sanctuary was not merely the interior of a church, but certain precincts defined by custom or royal grant. Debtors could take sanctuary in one of these precincts, live in relative comfort, and be immune from execution by their creditors. It …

Landlord Liability For Crimes Committed By Third Parties Against Tenants On The Premises, Irma W. Merrill

Vanderbilt Law Review

The controversial subject of landlord liability for crimes committed by third parties on the apartment premises has been the subject of much debate. The discussion has produced a scattering of opinions rather than one settled rule. Not all jurisdictions agree that a landlord should be held liable to his tenants for crimes on the premises. Even jurisdictions that do hold landlords liable for such crimes disagree on the basis for liability. Some courts ground their decisions in contract. Other courts conjure landlord liability out of an implied warranty of habitability. Still other courts impose landlord liability for third party crimes …

Modern Property Law: Cases And Materials, Dale A. Whitman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Most book reviews attempt to analyze the subject matter of the book under review. Casebooks, however, serve different purposes than other books; they are teaching tools that are useful only in the hands of an effective teacher. The editors of Modern Property Law are law teachers, and so am I. The purpose of this book review is to offer, as a professor of law, a personal view of this property casebook and to consider how it would function in the classroom. I have not yet used the book in my own property course because at the time of this writing …

Constitutional Limitations On Governmental Participation In Downtown Development Projects, David M. Lawrence

Vanderbilt Law Review

The purpose of this Article is to investigate the constitutional boundaries that surround the most common forms of governmental participation. Part II of the Article discusses the constitutional limitations on property transactions in which the government either uses its power of eminent domain to condemn land for private downtown development, acquires land for the same purpose through a voluntary sale by the owner of the land, or subsidizes private development by its method of conveying property to the developer. Part III of the Article then discusses the problems that arise when a downtown project includes both public and private facilities, …

Due-On-Sale Clauses: Separating Social Interests From Individual Interests, Joseph Gibson, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note suggests that courts have failed to articulate properly the relation of the due-on-sale clause to the legal doctrines under which it has been challenged. In particular, courts that have considered the clauses to be restraints on alienation have concentrated on the impact of enforcement or nonenforcement on the borrower, and have ignored almost completely the social interest in the free transferability of land, which has been the traditional rationale for the rule against restraints. Likewise, courts that have considered due-on-sale clauses under equitable principles frequently have failed to articulate whether the inequity arises from an attempt by one …

Land Trusts: An Alternative Method Of Preserving Open Space, Randee G. Fenner

Vanderbilt Law Review

In an effort to provide the background necessary to maximize the land trust's potential, this Article undertakes a three-part analysis, focusing on (1) the steps necessary to organize the land trust; (2) the techniques that may be used to accomplish the transfer of property to the land trust; and (3) the tax consequences associated with the land trust's conservation activities-consequences that may dictate the form that the transfer will take and upon which the success or failure of the preservation effort may hinge.

Open Space Taxation And State Constitutions, David A. Myers

Vanderbilt Law Review

this Article will first examine the theoretical function and form of state constitutions. This analysis can in turn be used to develop criteria for evaluating the content of these open space amendments. These criteria can then be used to suggest alternative methods of constitutional change that will allow state governments to respond most effectively to contemporary problems in the taxation of real property.

... This Article has been concerned with the various justifications for putting open space taxation provisions in state constitutions. It should be noted, however, that these amendments can have important negative effects on state constitutional law. Because …

Loosening The Grip Of The Dead Hand: Shall We Abolish Legal Future Interests In Land?, C. Dent Bostick

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article is concerned with a dilemma in the law of Future Interests. The dilemma stems from the needs and demands of a modern society to convey land cleanly and quickly and from the desire of property owners, especially landowners, to direct from the grave the on-going disposition of their property. This desire of landowners has always played a role in English and American property law. Much of the energy of the early judiciary was devoted to counter balancing the numerous ingenious arrangements devised by persons to effectuate continual control of their property.

Book Reviews, Paul L. Murphy, Richard E. Ellis

Vanderbilt Law Review

Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality By Richard Kluger

Reviewed by Paul L. Murphy

Richard Kluger is a novelist and editor who retired to devote his full time to an extensive study of the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education.' Perceiving the Brown decision as a watershed with respect to America's willingness to confront the consequences of centuries of racial discrimination, Kluger set out to tell the entire story of the Brown decision. Kluger approaches the Brown case not as a study of the law and …

Eliminating Redlining By Judicial Action: Are Erasers Available?, Paul A. Renne

Vanderbilt Law Review

This paper will consider one practice--mortgage disinvestment, commonly referred to as "redlining"--which has worked incontravention to the declared policy of Congress by contributing to the destruction of the urban housing inventory and has been partly responsible for the failure to meet our housing goals. This paper will discuss the concept and effects of redlining, the relevant statutes and administrative regulations, and the use of class action litigation as a means of eliminating the practice. Before turning to this discussion, however, it is important to emphasize that eliminating the practice of redlining will prove no panacea to our urban problems. It …

The Great Section 38 Property Muddle, J. A. Cragwall, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

Twelve full years have elapsed since section 38 property made its first appearance on the stage of tax law. In those twelve years, a complicated, confusing, ad hoc, and often inconsistent body of rulings and judicial decisions has grown up around the definitional regulation; words and phrases have acquired strange new meanings and connotations in the lush overgrowth of legal reasoning clinging to that regulation. The paradoxes in the regulation (such as that addressed in Weirick) and, more often, the ambiguities resulting from an almost universal failure by the regulations to define, instead of simply illustrate, its terms (such as …

The Private Use Of Public Power: The Private University And The Power Of Eminent Domain, Charles Fels Special Projects Editor, N. T. Adams, Richard Carmody, Margaret E. Clark, Randolph H. Lanier, James C. Smith, Robert M. White

Vanderbilt Law Review

The study which follows attempts to trace, in a necessarily limited fashion, the evolving use of eminent domain on behalf of private interest groups throughout the last century and a half of American legal history. Part One of the study traces the broadening scope of eminent domain in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on the direct use of eminent domain by private interest groups as a key element in the increasing breadth of the power. Part Two delineates the process whereby one modern private interest group-an informal aggregation of American colleges and universities-succeeded in acquiring …

Alternative Gains Tax Treatments Of Decedents' Appreciated Capital Assets, D. Allen Grumbine

Vanderbilt Law Review

The present treatment of appreciated assets under section 1014' of the Code permits a great deal of accrued appreciation to escape the income tax. While decedents pay a greater estate tax because asset appreciation swells their estates, they pay no gains tax at death on this accrued appreciation. Moreover, the recipients of the decedent's property generally take a stepped-up basis for the property equal to its fair market value at the time of death. A great deal of criticism has been leveled at this system, and numerous proposals have been made for remedying the situation: imposition of a capital gains …

Recent Cases, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

Conflict of Laws--Torts--Lex Loci Delicti Is Proper Law When Parties Are Domiciled in Different Jurisdictions Unless Displacing That Law Advances Forum State's Substantive Law Purposes Without Impeding Interstate Relations or Predictability of Result

Plaintiff, an Ontario domiciliary, brought an action in New York for the wrongful death of her husband, also a domiciliary of Ontario,who was killed in a collision in that province' while a passenger in an automobile driven by defendant's intestate, a New York domiciliary. Defendant pleaded as an affirmative defense the Ontario guest statute, which restricts a guest's recovery to damages for injuries sustained only as a …

Exclusionary Zoning Practices: An Examination Of The Current Controversy, W. Harold Bigham, C. Dent Bostick

Vanderbilt Law Review

For the last 45 years the idea that local zoning administration is a highly desirable exercise of the state police power has become progressively more entrenched in urban thinking and planning. Although opponents of zoning have quarreled with details of administration or decried the failure of the Supreme Court to continuously oversee implementation of the zoning concept, they have assumed basic Euclidian zoning theory' to be beyond serious challenge. This assumption is no longer valid, for classic municipal zoning is on the firing line and its survival is by no means certain.

Special Project - Nashville Model Cities: A Case Study, Richard W. Creswell, Alan Gates, Paul M. Kurtz, Paul R. Regendorf, Samuel W. Bartholomew, Jr., Richard K. Greenstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

The future of the Model Cities program in Nashville is difficult to predict. As of this writing, the program is approaching the end of the first of five action years. The suit filed by the CCC in April 1971, is,more than a year later, still pending. It is, of course, possible that the program may eventually prove successful, but such a result is unlikely. Even if the CCC is replaced as the official citizen participation structure for the program, the ideological constituency from which the group derives its strength will remain. Furthermore, as the CDA continues to build an ad …

The Impact Of The Tax Reform Act Of 1969 On The Supply Of Adequate Housing, Kenneth J. Guido, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

Hidden by the storm surrounding the more controversial changes in the Tax Reform Act of 1969 are subtle alterations in the tax structure that may significantly affect the rate and nature of real estate development. The Tax Reform Act amended provisions of the Internal Revenue Code directly applicable to real estate investments,' purposefully redesigning them in the hope of stimulating the construction and rehabilitation of rental housing, particularly low-income housing. The changes in the basic tax structure relative to real estate investments are an attempt to continue a national policy established in 1949, that of providing a "decent home and …

Legal And Policy Conflicts Between Deed Covenants And Subsequently Enacted Zoning Ordinances, Wade B. Perry, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

With increasing frequency, the real estate lawyer is confronted with the need to determine the effect of a newly enacted zoning ordinance upon the enforceability of prior restrictive covenants affecting property in the zoned area. If the enforceability of the covenant is cut off by the ordinance, the further question arises whether the city must compensate the landowner for interfering with his property rights. Existing rules provide largely unsatisfactory answers and conclusions reached do not always reflect the balancing of public against private interests fundamental to all zoning. Moreover, new types of zoning regulations have been found to generate conflicts …

Another And Hopefully Final Look At The Property--Personal Liberty Distinction Of Section 1343(3), John Lecornu

Vanderbilt Law Review

Recent years have witnessed increasing confusion and uncertainty over the proper scope of section 1343(3) of Title 28 of the United States Code, the jurisdictional counterpart of section 1983 of Title 42. Both provisions originated in the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Section 1983 creates a cause of action to redress the deprivation, under color of state law, of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or laws. Section 1343(3) grants to the federal district courts original jurisdiction, irrespective of amount in controversy, over any civil action authorized by law that is commenced by any person: "To redress …

Extending Standing To Nonresidents--A Response To The Exclusionary Effects Of Zoning Fragmentation, Kent H. Mcmahan

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Note is premised on the belief that courts must recognize the standing of adversely affected nonresidents to contest local zoning ordinances in order to insure appropriate consideration of the issues raised by exclusionary zoning practices in the nation's suburbs. To support this premise, the Note surveys the current fragmented status of zoning, the problems attributable to this fragmentation, and then on judicial attempts to resolve the problems. In addition, the Note analyzes the judicial approach to zoning fragmentation, with special scrutiny given to the law of standing as an obstacle to efficacious judicial review. Against this background, the Note …

"Fair Market Value," "Just Compensation," And The Constitution: A Critical View, W. Harold Bigham

Vanderbilt Law Review

It has become almost an article of faith that "fair market value"constitutes the only fair and workable measure of damages for a landowner whose real property has been taken for public use. The courts apply it woodenly;' the magic words are solemnly intoned to jurors, commissioners, and arbitrators. Even the learned scholars in the field give it at least implicit recognition. Moreover, it continues to flourish despite widespread public dissatisfaction with both the substantive test for damages and the procedures through which the land is obtained. The taking of private property for the federal interstate highway and urban renewal programs, …

Condominiums: Incorporation Of The Common Elements--A Proposal, John H. Bailery, Iii, Lawrence C. Ashby

Vanderbilt Law Review

Although the establishment of a common element corporation will provide the unit owners with some relief from major legal problems,close examination clearly reveals that such a proposal is not a ready cure for the condominium's many drawbacks. Among the proposal's chief benefits is the elimination of unlimited, joint and several liability for the unit owners. At the same time, responsibility for liability and casualty insurance coverage will be more clearly defined with the consequent elimination of double coverage. A variety of procedural questions will also be resolved since the corporation will be directly responsible for the common areas and facilities …