Law Commons^™

Contract-Wrapped Property, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

For nearly two centuries, the law has allowed servitudes that “run with” real property while consistently refusing to permit servitudes attached to personal property. That is, owners of land can establish new, specific requirements for the property that bind all future owners—but owners of chattels cannot. In recent decades, however, firms have increasingly begun relying on contract provisions that purport to bind future owners of chattels. These developments began in the context of software licensing, but they have started to migrate to chattels not encumbered by software. Courts encountering these provisions have mostly missed their significance, focusing instead on questions …

Adapting Private Law For Climate Change Adaptation, Jim Rossi, J. B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The private law of torts, property, and contracts will and should play an important role in resolving disputes regarding how private individuals and entities respond to and manage the harms of climate change that cannot be avoided through mitigation (known in climate change policy dialogue as “adaptation”). While adaptation is commonly presented as a problem needing legislative solutions, this Article presents a novel and overdue case for private law to take climate adaptation seriously.

To date, the role of private law is a significant blind spot in scholarly discussions of climate adaptation. Litigation invoking common-law doctrines in climate adaption disputes …

Deals In The Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, And How Law Can Help, Christiana Ochoa

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Informed by original empirical research conducted in the Midwestern United States, this Article provides a rich and textured understanding of the rapidly emerging opposition to renewable energy projects. Beyond the Article’s urgent practical contributions, it also examines the importance of formalism and formality in contracts and complicates current understandings.

Rural communities in every windblown and sun-drenched region of the United States are enmeshed in legal, political, and social conflicts related to the country’s rapid transition to renewable energy. Organized local opposition has foreclosed millions of acres from renewable energy development, impeding national and state-level commitments to achieving renewable energy targets …

Law School News: The Dean Meets The Governor 01-26-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Leases As Forms, David A. Hoffman, Anton Strezhnev

All Faculty Scholarship

We offer the first large scale descriptive study of residential leases, based on a dataset of ~170,000 residential leases filed in support of over ~200,000 Philadelphia eviction proceedings from 2005 through 2019. These leases are highly likely to contain unenforceable terms, and their pro-landlord tilt has increased sharply over time. Matching leases with individual tenant characteristics, we show that unlawful terms are surprisingly likely to be associated with more expensive leaseholds in richer, whiter parts of the city. This result is linked to landlords' growing adoption of shared forms, originally created by non-profit landlord associations, and more recently available online …

Cutting Pension Rights For Public Workers: Don't Look To The Courts For Help, Ronald H. Rosenberg

Faculty Publications

Every day we rely on public employees to provide us with a broad range of services necessary to daily life. These workers include public school teachers, fire and police, emergency medical technicians, park rangers, nurses just to name a few. As public employees, these people work for local and state government and they are compensated by us for their services through the taxes we pay. In general, these are modestly paid workers who also receive pensions when they retire after many years of work. Following the financial crisis of 2008-2009, government retirement trust funds significantly lost value and their long-term …

Land Baron Invs. V. Bonnie Springs Family Lp, 131 Nev. Adv. Op. 69 (Sept. 17, 2015), Rob Schmidt

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

This case is an appeal arising from a failed land sale contract. The Court considered three issues of first impression, holding that (1) when a party bears the risk, mutual mistake is not a basis for rescission; (2) an abuse of process claim may not be supported by a complaint to an administrative agency; (3) a nuisance claim seeking only emotional distress damages must be supported by proof of physical harm. Ultimately, The Court affirmed in part and reversed in part.

Double Diamond V. Second Jud. Dist. Ct., 131 Nev. Adv. Op. 57 (July 30, 2015), Janine Lee

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

NRS 116.3105(2) permits homeowners associations to terminate contracts at any time if the declarant did not enter into the contract in good faith or if the contract was unconscionable to the units’ owners at the time of contract formation.[1] The statute requires that an association provide at least 90 days notice of termination under this provision. The 90-day notice period in NRS 116.3105(2) does not operate as a statute of limitations nor does it shift the burden to a notice recipient to file an action. Instead, NRS 11.190 is applicable, resulting in either a four-year or six-year statute of …

Contesting Disclaimer-Of-Reliance Clauses By Efficiency, Free Will, And Conscience: Staving Off Caveat Emptor, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article hopes to make evident two trends seemingly in conflict. The first trend is toward raising the standards of probity and veridicality in contractual relations toward greater accountability and liability on market actors operating outside traditional bounds. The first is expressed by new rules that: require good faith and fair dealing between parties; ensure sellers are obligated to disclose material facts about a property otherwise unavailable to buyers; and make wrongdoing parties liable to non-parties who foreseeably relied on the wrongdoers' contractual undertakings. This trend promises to avert injury, achieve efficiency, and seems to accord with society's evolving notions …

Sovereign Debt And The Three And A Half Minute Transaction: What Sticky Boilerplate Reveals About Contract Law And Practice, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

The Three and a Half Minute Transaction: Boilerplate and the Limits of Contractual Design, by Mitu Gulati and Robert E. Scott, is a cautionary tale about modern legal practice where the protagonist is the standard sovereign debt contract. The book discloses an undeniable flaw in sovereign bond boilerplate (the widely used pari passu clause) that, in spite of expensive, sophisticated lawyering, perpetuates a risky disconnect between party intent and contract terms. The fact that boilerplate terms persist even in elite sovereign-lending practices suggests that the problem of over-reliance on standard form language is ubiquitous.When contract terms diverge from client risk …

Property Law: 1997 Survey Of Florida Law, Ronald B. Brown, Joseph M. Grohman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Real Property: 1992 Survey Of Florida Law, Ronald B. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Statutory Personal Property Lease Law In Alabama, Peter A. Alces, P. Cade Newman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Property, W. Wade Berryhill

Law Faculty Publications

The 1986 General Assembly may be remembered as much for what it did not do as for what it did. Carried over into the next session was House Bill 810, which would have abolished dower and curtesy in favor of a statutory share for the surviving spouse in the deceased spouse's estate. Of course, passage of this bill would have ushered in significant change in the practice of decedents' estates. Significantly, passage of the bill also would have legislatively overruled recent judicial and legislative activity which has created the sole and separate estate, for both female and male, allowing circumvention …