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Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell
Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell
Thomas W. Mitchell
Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales. Though some scholars and the media have highlighted how thousands of African-Americans have lost an untold amount of property and substantial real …
Restoring Hope For Heirs Property Owners: The Uniform Partition Of Heirs Property Act, Thomas W. Mitchell
Restoring Hope For Heirs Property Owners: The Uniform Partition Of Heirs Property Act, Thomas W. Mitchell
Thomas W. Mitchell
For well over 125 years, many Americans have lost their tenancy-in-common property involuntarily in various legal proceedings. For example, courts throughout this country have often resolved partition actions, a legal proceeding in which a tenant in common seeks to exit a tenancy in common, by ordering a forced, partition sale of the property even when these courts could have ordered a remedy that would have preserved the property rights of the tenants in common. Though partition sales have negatively impacted a broad cross section of people in this country, the sales have particularly impacted poor and disadvantaged African-Americans, Hispanics, white …
Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell
Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell
Thomas W. Mitchell
Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it …