Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Michigan Law Review
Property law’s roots are rural. America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded their physical place in it. But we have drifted far from this ideal. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, and rural communities are in decline. The fee simple ownership form has failed every agrarian objective but one: the maintenance of white landownership. For it was also embedded in the original American experiment that land ownership would be racialized for the benefit of its white citizens, through acts of …
Race And Property Law, K-Sue Park
Race And Property Law, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This chapter offers an outline for understanding the key role of race in producing property values in the history of the American property law system. It identifies major developments in the mutually formative relationship between race and property in America that made and remade property interests in America through the processes of 1) dispossessing nonwhites, 2) degrading their homelands, communities, and selves, and 3) limiting their efforts to enter public space and occupy or acquire property within the regime thereby established. First, it describes the use of law to create the two most important forms of property in the colonies …