Property Law and Real Estate Commons^™

When Tokenized Real-World Assets Collide With Real World, Biying Cheng, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The city of Detroit filed a public nuisance lawsuit in July of last year in the Michigan Circuit Court for the Third Judicial Circuit against Real Token, its co-founders and 165 affiliated entities, alleging building code and safety violations across over 400 Detroit residential properties.[1] RealT is a blockchain real estate platform that sells fractional interests in individual U.S. rental properties through the issuance of crypto security tokens.

On July 22, the judge issued a temporary restraining order — later converted into a preliminary injunction on Nov. 4 — barring RealT from collecting rent, pursuing evictions without a certificate of …

Graduare Property Development Limited V A & J Interiors Limited Appeal No. 253/2023, Clement Ngoma

SAIPAR Case Review

This case underscores the importance of courts adhering to the well-established principle that issues not raised during the trial cannot be introduced as grounds of appeal. In this judgment, the Court of Appeal had an opportunity to clarify the legal implications of the non-registration of lease agreements, but it also highlighted the broader issue of raising legal points at any stage of proceedings, including on appeal. Despite the non-registration of the lease agreement, the Court of Appeal emphasized that such a legal issue could still be addressed during an appeal, reaffirming the flexibility of legal proceedings in protecting the rights …

Blockchain Coming To A Block Near You: How Fintech Is Changing Real Estate Investing, Joseph Bizub, Justin Peralta, David Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Until recently, real estate with a small footprint – one-to-four-family homes as well as small retail, office, and industrial buildings – were generally within the purview of small investors who invested locally. Today, because of technological advances, these owner-occupants and investors face competition from an emerging class of decentralized finance (DeFi) investors. Fintech companies are presenting DeFi investors with new approaches to the challenges that real estate investing traditionally poses: illiquidity, high capital requirements, lack of diversification, and opaque markets. This article focuses on how fintech companies are meeting those challenges and suggests that while much of their vaunted innovation …

Molosoni Chipabwamba And 12 Other Displaced Village Owners V Yssel Enterprises Limited Appeal No.104/2020 (Zmca) 2022, Mwami Kabwabwa

SAIPAR Case Review

The issue of customary land tenure and customary land rights is an important issue that has serious implications on customary communities that occupy land under customary tenure. Considering the raising demand of customary land by both local and international investors the courts play an important role in protecting the interests and rights of customary communities and ensuring that such communities are not exploited in the alienation process of customary land and in the procedures of converting from customary tenure to statutory where it is necessary and where the benefits of converting to statutory tenure outweigh the benefits of customary tenure. …

How Fintech Cos. May Transform Real Estate Investment, Joseph Bizub, Justin Peralta, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Until relatively recently, real estate with a small footprint — one-to-four-family homes as well as small retail, office and industrial buildings — were generally within the sole purview of small investors who invested locally.

Today, because of technological advances, these owner-occupants and investors face significant competition from institutional investors and an emerging class of decentralized finance investors.

These fintech companies are bringing new approaches to the challenges that real estate investing traditionally poses: illiquidity, lack of capital, lack of diversification and uneven access to market information.

This article focuses on how decentralized finance investors in particular are meeting those challenges …

Sharing Your Home With Strangers: Common-Interest Ownership And Financing Options, Debra Bechtel, Crystal Liu, Ernira Mehmetaj, David Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As the affordable housing crisis in the U.S. escalates, housing policy analysts and advocates are re-examining, modifying, and combining ways of decreasing the costs of homeownership through shared ownership and shared financing while also, in some instances, preserving long-term affordability. This Article will touch upon the vast array of models and take a deep dive into one of them, the relatively new shared equity financing model. That model holds some promise and a lot of peril for homeowners.

The Promise And Perils Of Shared Equity Financing, Ernira Mehmetaj, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It is the rare homeowner, or even lawyer, who thinks twice about why mortgages are part of so many real estate transactions. Real estate is expensive, and few have the money to pay cash for a home. As a result, people enter into transactions with mortgage lenders and are exposed to all of the risks that come along with mortgage financing: default, late fees, and foreclosure.

If you stripped away all of our history and our current practices in financing homeownership with mortgages, you might ask how could people with limited assets acquire something as expensive as a home? It …

Developing A Digital Property Law Regime, Kevin Dong

Cornell Law Review

Despite scholarship and conversation of digital and virtual property having been around for well over a decade, we are still stuck in the same cycle of arguing whether property law, contract law, or intellectual property law should govern. The problems, although different in scope from what early scholars had thought, have grown in severity and multitude. We have made some good strides in the scholarship since then. Whether scholars are proponents of property law, contract law, or intellectual property law, they have all recognized that there are some problems with the current governing structure of digital objects. We have a …

Public Accommodations & Human Flourishing: Sexual Orientation & Religious Liberty: An Essay In Honor Of Greg Alexander, Joseph William Singer

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Greg Alexander's monumental contributions to our understanding of property and property law are unequaled. He is also a mensch and that comes through loud and clear in his work. His recent book, Property and Human Flourishing, develops a quasi-Aristotelian theory of property that focuses our attention on the ways property law protects plural incommensurable objective values that regulate social relationships in order to empower us to become the authors of our own lives. This Essay honors him and his contributions by applying his analysis to the fraught question of whether owners of public accommodations must serve the public without regard …

Much Obliged? Moral Psychology And The Social Obligation Of Property: An Essay In Honor Of Gregory Alexander, Nestor M. Davidson

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Few scholars have argued as eloquently as Gregory Alexander for the normative force of social obligation in American property law and for a broader understanding of property as inherently relational. The idea that mutual regard for the ability of each person to have meaningful life choices means that ownership entails duties to others has always seemed to me-perhaps not surprisingly given my own moral intuitive priors-deeply compelling. But it is clear that other moral intuitions lead people to value just as deeply and just as intuitively property's ability to establish individual sanctuary within strong, clear boundaries. I don't have the …

It's Not Personal: Social Obligations In The Office Of Ownership, Larissa Katz

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

In November 2016, the City of Vancouver passed its "Vacancy Tax By-law." The law requires homeowners to submit a property status declaration each year to the City, revealing the uses they are making of their property. An owner whose property is not rented or in use for at least 6 months a year is subject to a vacancy tax. The stated purpose of the law is to address the affordable housing crisis in Vancouver, a city where the official rental vacancy rate is less than 1%. By penalizing absentee owners, the law is intended to increase supply and to deter …

Data And The Social Obligation Norm Of Property: An Essay In Honor Of Professor Gregory S. Alexander, Christopher K. Odinet

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

In the age of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal and sundry other data breaches at Under Armour, Target, and Best Buy, the issue of security and privacy in consumer data has become increasingly important. For much of the modern era, the development of technology has gone relatively unchecked, with the United States having ceded much of the policymaking terrain to Silicon Valley. This has resulted in the unbridled creation of vast amounts of consumer data. Users who engage with tech platforms generate bits and bytes about themselves based on their activities, preferences, and habits. This information-this "data"- is then harnessed by …

Community Land Trusts: Institutionalizing The Human Flourishing Theory Of Property, John A. Lovett

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Greg Alexander has made a powerful case that an owner of property in a free and democratic society will be required from time to time to provide resources, in ways appropriate to that owner, to support the development of other persons' human capabilities. In this essay, I focus attention on legal relationships epitomizing Alexander's human flourishing theory that owe their genesis in the collaborative work of community activists, who often began their efforts from positions of devout religious conviction, and public-spirited transactional lawyers. The product of that work is the property law institution known as the Community Land Trust (CLT).

The Community In The Planned Community, Nadav Shoked

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

This Essay explores, and analyzes the long-term effects of, the turn in the 1980s towards a more communitarian-oriented analysis of planned communities. It shows that until late in the twentieth century property law commentators grounded the rule-making powers of condominiums and homeowners associations in the alleged consent of individual unit owners. The Essay argues that this approach, focused on a supposedly clear-cut dichotomy between consent and coercion, echoed arcane concepts characteristic of legal thinking in the late nineteenth century-concepts which realist thinkers had discredited long ago. Thus, abandoning this account of planned communities' power in favor of an explanation founded …

The Holy Grail Of Progressive Property: Essay In Honor Of Greg Alexander, Laura S. Underkuffler

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Greg Alexander is a towering figure in the legal academy. His work, over a period of forty years, has illuminated the most fundamental issues in property law and theory. It has transformed the field and inspired scholars in the United States and abroad.

During his career, Professor Alexander has arguably done more than any other single individual in explicating what human values underlie and should underlie the institution of private property in the United States and elsewhere. Through his efforts, the idea that property regimes must consider the effects of resource distribution on all members of the human family has …

Commodity & Propriety In Contemporary New York City: Essay, Katrina M. Wyman

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

One of Professor Greg Alexander's central contributions to property scholarship is his emphasis on the multiple understandings of private property in the American legal tradition. Private property, he underscored in Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought 1776-1970, has never been understood by American legal elites solely as a commodity providing owners with a robust right to pursue their private preferences and accumulate wealth unfettered by government regulation. For hundreds of years, private property also has been regarded as a tool of "propriety" through which governments promote social purposes, the specifics of which have been contested …

Liberalism And The Commons, Hanoch Dagan

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

It is a real privilege for me to participate in the celebration of Greg Alexander's enormous contribution to the scholarship and jurisprudence on property, which has enhanced our understanding of property in numerous ways. Alexander utilized almost every tool in a legal theorist's kit-notably: history, comparative law, and philosophical investigation-to study property and developed an innovative and nuanced theory of property. Property, for Alexander, has a core role in fostering human flourishing. A proper conception of property, he claims, must acknowledge that obligations and not just rights, and communities and not only individuals, take center stage.

Easements, Servitudes And Human Flourishing Theory, Andrea Loux Jarman

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Professor Alexander's final monograph is an exploration of what he has termed "human flourishing theory." Human flourishing theory holds that the ownership of private property carries with it obligations to foster human flourishing-whether of individual neighbours or local communities. This Article examines two cases in the British law of easements and servitudes, where the judiciary expanded the scope of doctrines of land law so as to uphold the legal right of neighbours to use private land.

Past And Present: The Dialectics Of Property: An Essay In Honor Of Gregory Alexander, Shelly Kreiczer-Levy

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

This Essay explores the dialectic between stability and dynamism in property, inspired by the work of Gregory Alexander. Its focus is inheritance law and the conflicting commitments between the past and the present. Inheritance contributes an added layer of complexity to the familiar dialectic. It complicates the tension between communities and individualism and adds a dialectic between a commitment to past values, tradition and customs and a commitment to individual values and a fresh voice. This complexity advances a double, contradictory meaning of current inheritance rules. On the one hand, testamentary freedom symbolizes individualism and dynamism, because it provides owners …

Zoning For Families, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Is a group of eight unrelated adults and three children living together and sharing meals, household expenses, and responsibilities—and holding themselves out to the world to have long-term commitments to each other—a family? Not according to most zoning codes—including that of Hartford, Connecticut, where the preceding scenario presented itself a few years ago. Zoning, which is the local regulation of land use, almost always defines family, limiting those who may live in a dwelling unit to those who satisfy the zoning code’s definition. Often times, this definition is drafted in a way that excludes many modern living arrangements and preferences. …

Property, Dignity, And Human Flourishing, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Review

Human flourishing and human dignity are not empty phrases. They have real content, and they matter in real lives. The facts are that we want to live flourishing lives and we want to live lives of dignity. We cannot live such lives, however, unless certain conditions are fulfilled. Among these conditions, flourishing is personal autonomy, understood in the sense of self-authorship. Autonomy in that sense itself requires certain conditions. Property is among the conditions intimately connected with self-authorship. A person who lacks basic forms of property such as food and adequate shelter is denied self-authorship, without which she cannot experience …

Rethinking "Just" Compensation: Dignity Restoration As A Basis For Supplementing Existing Takings Remedies With Government-Supported Community Building Initiatives, Alyssa M. Hasbrouck

Cornell Law Review

Longstanding calls for the Supreme Court to revisit the Takings Clause's just compensation requirement are especially relevant in light of urban renewal's destructive history. However, the just compensation requirement should be viewed as a floor, not as a ceiling. Even in the absence of formal action by courts, legislatures and local governments can act to fulfill the government's constitutional obligation of "full and perfect" compensation. By taking preemptive action to support community-based initiatives, financially as well as politically, the same legislatures that seized and destroyed urban neighborhoods can begin to set things right. Court-ordered investments in the longterm well-being of …

Small Business Jobs Survival Act May Have Opposite Effect, David J. Reiss, Areeb Been Khan, Robert Levy, Juliana Malandro

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The New York City Council is considering a bill, the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, that it claims will protect small businesses even though the Act contains no protections tailored to them. Instead, the Act would implement a new lease renewal arbitration system that treats all commercial tenancies the same, allowing businesses as large as Amazon to benefit.

Regulatory Takings And The Constitutionality Of Commercial Rent Regulation In New York City, Henry Topper

Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research Papers

In recent years, the plight of small businesses in New York City has become a contentious topic. Although the city and its current mayoral administration share a long-standing commitment to affordable housing, the city’s small businesses—an integral and defining feature of the urban landscape—have suffered immensely. In the past decade, local establishments have largely given way to a homogeneous landscape of empty storefronts and national chain stores.The loss of local busi- ness occurs with such staggering frequency that there is an entire thriving blog subculture documenting their “vanishing” and the Center for an Urban Future publishes an annual report on …

Comprehensive Rezonings, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Of all powers given to local governments, the power to zone is one of the most significant. Zoning dictates everything that gets built in a locality—and thus effectively dictates all of the key activities that take place within it. Nationwide, most zoning codes were adopted in the first half of the twentieth century. Many, including the zoning codes of New York City and Chicago, were significantly revised in the 1960s. While these codes have been revised piecemeal, just a few American cities have undergone a comprehensive revision: replacing the old code with a completely new one.

A comprehensive rezoning can …

Of Buildings, Statues, Art, And Sperm: The Right To Destroy And The Duty To Preserve, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Courts tend to frame right-to-destroy disputes in terms of a conflict between respecting individual autonomy and avoiding social waste. That framing unduly obscures what is involved in these cases. Autonomy is a rich value that requires discerned investigation, and social waste masks the existence of community capabilities of legitimate concern. A human flourishing perspective illuminates these multiple values and capabilities. Conflicts involving the right to destroy resist neat categorical solutions, but that does not mean that they cannot be resolved rationally or even with a relatively high degree of predictability, as I have tried to show in this Article.

Under-Propertied Persons, Marc L. Roark

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

Property shapes the way we talk about our communities and ourselves. It also, unintentionally, shapes the way we talk about the poor. Within property, the doctrine of waste reinforces notions of autonomy, privacy, and boundary-making for property owners, while leaving those without property searching for other ways to assert these self-defining protections. Likewise, nuisance assists owners' participation in their communities by dictating when individuals must account for harms their property use causes to neighbors. The law, however, provides few legal remedies for poor persons who are harmed by owners' sanctioned use of property. Through the language of ownership, property doctrines …

Cfpb Comment Letter Re Atr/Qm Assessment, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Cfpb Comment Letter Re Respa Assessment, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Objects Of Art; Objects Of Property, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Seemingly worlds apart, art and the law of property in fact share much in common. Some of this shared space is obvious, the result of their intersection through property law's protection and regulation of art. But another aspect of their commonality is considerably less obvious. Both rely, implicitly and in ways not always acknowledged, on assumptions about objects in the world-thing-ness. That is, both have relied, or traditionally have done so, on certain assumptions about the nature of objects-the objects of art and the objects of property-and the upshot of those assumptions is that those objects are characterized by thing-ness, …