Law and Race Commons^™

Historic Partition Law Reform: A Game Changer For Heirs’ Property Owners, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

Over the course of several decades, many disadvantaged families who owned property under the tenancy-in-common form of ownership—property these families often referred to as heirs’ property—have had their property forcibly sold as a result of court-ordered partition sales. For several decades, repeated efforts to reform State partition laws produced little to no reform despite clear evidence that these laws unjustly harmed many families. This paper addresses the remarkable success of a model State statute named the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), which has been enacted into law in several States since 2011, including in five southern States. The …

Review Of The Fight For Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences And Future Implications Of The 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

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 …

From Reconstruction To Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, And Community Through Partition Sales Of Tenancies In Common, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

This article considers one of the primary ways in which African Americans have lost millions of acres of land that they were able to acquire in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning part of the twentieth century and the sociopolitical implications of this land loss. Specifically, this article highlights the fact that forced partition sales of tenancy in common property, referred to more commonly as heirs' property, have been a major source of black land loss within the African American community. The article argues that involuntary black land loss has had a significant negative impact upon …

Forced Sale Risk: Class, Race, And The "Double Discount", Thomas W. Mitchell, Stephen Malpezzi, Richard K. Green

Thomas W. Mitchell

What impact does a forced sale have upon a property owner's wealth? And do certain characteristics of a property owner such as whether they are rich or poor or whether they are black or white, tend to affect the price yielded at a forced sale? This Article addresses arguments made by some courts and legal scholars who have claimed that certain types of forced sales result in wealth maximizing, economic efficiencies. The Article addresses such economic arguments by returning to first principles and reviewing the distinction between sales conducted under fair market value conditions and sales conducted under forced sale …

In The Racial Crosshairs: Reconsidering Racially Targeted Predatory Lending Under A New Theory Of Economic Hate Crime, 35 U. Tol. L. Rev. 211 (2003), Cecil J. Hunt Ii

Cecil J. Hunt II

No abstract provided.

Segregation In The Chicago Metropolitan Area: Some Immediate Measures To Reverse This Impediment To Fair Housing (2013), F. Willis Caruso

F. Willis Caruso

No abstract provided.

Counseling A Victim Of Racial Discrimination In A Fair Housing Case, 26 J. Marshall L. Rev. 53 (1992), Michael P. Seng, Jay Einhorn, Merilyn D. Brown

Michael P. Seng

No abstract provided.

We Want What's Ours: Learning From South Africa's Land Restitution Program (Oxford University Press), Bernadette Atuahene

Bernadette Atuahene

The Importance Of Conversation In Transitional Justice: A Study Of Land Restitution In South Africa, Bernadette Atuahene

Bernadette Atuahene

One of the most replicated findings of the procedural justice literature is that people who receive unfavorable outcomes are more likely to believe that the process was nonetheless legitimate if they thought that it was fair. Using interviews of 150 people compensated through the South African land restitution program, this article examines whether these findings apply in the transitional justice context where it is often unclear who the winners and losers are. The question explored is: When all outcomes are unfavorable or incomplete, how do people make fairness assessments? The central observation was that the ability of respondents and land …

The Blacks Who "Got Their Forty Acres": A Theory Of Black West Indian Migrant Asset Acquisition, Eleanor M. Brown

Eleanor M Brown