Property Law and Real Estate Commons^™

Introduction, Steven Bender

SITIE Symposiums

No abstract provided.

A Perpetual Cycle Of “Give-And-Take”: The Case For Texas Eminent Domain Reform, Kathryn Faulk

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Water Justice: The Ninth Circuit Examines The Fair Housing Act In The Context Of Water Services In Southwest Fair Housing Council Inc. V. Maricopa Domestic Water Improvement District, Zachary J. Thummborst

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Change We Can Believe In: The Seventh Circuit's Exposure Of Inadequate Environmental Review In Protect Our Parks V. Buttigieg, P. Nicholas Greco

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Respectfully, I Dissent: Easterling V. Hal Pac Properties, L.P. And Making A Mess Of Idaho Real Property Law, Jerrold A. Long

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beneath The Property Taxes Financing Education, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

Many states turn in sizable part to local property taxes to finance public education. Political and academic discourse on the extent to which these taxes should serve in this role largely centers on second-order issues, such as the vices and virtues of local control, the availability of mechanisms to redistribute property tax revenues across school districts, and the overall stability of those revenues. This Essay contends that such discourse would benefit from directing greater attention to the justice of the government’s threshold choices about property law and policy that impact the property values against which property taxes are levied.

The …

Rethinking Education Theft Through The Lens Of Intellectual Property And Human Rights, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay problematizes the increased propertization and commodification of education and calls for a rethink of the emergent concept of “education theft” through the lens of intellectual property and human rights. This concept refers to the phenomenon where parents, or legal guardians, enroll children in schools outside their school districts by intentionally violating the residency requirements. The Essay begins by revisiting the debate on intellectual property rights as property rights. It discusses the ill fit between intellectual property law and the traditional property model, the impediments the law has posed to public access to education, and select reforms that have …

Personhood, Property, And Public Education: The Case Of Plyler V. Doe, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Property law is having a moment, one that is getting education scholars’ attention. Progressive scholars are retooling the concepts of ownership and entitlement to incorporate norms of equality and inclusion. Some argue that property law can even secure access to public education despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s longstanding refusal to recog- nize a right to basic schooling. Others worry that property doctrine is inherently exclusionary. In their view, property-based concepts like resi- dency have produced opportunity hoarding in schools that serve affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods. Many advocates therefore believe that equity will be achieved only by moving beyond property-based claims, …

(Some) Land Back...Sort Of: The Transfer Of Federal Public Lands To Indian Tribes Since 1970, Audrey Glendenning, Martin Nie, Monte Mills

Articles

Federal public lands in the United States were carved from the territories of Native Nations and, in nearly every instance, required that the United States extinguish pre-existing aboriginal title. Following acquisition of these lands, the federal government pursued various strategies for them, including disposal to states and private parties, managing lands to allow for multiple uses, and conservation or protection. After over a century of such varied approaches, the modern public landscape is a complex milieu of public and private interests, laws and policies, and patchwork ownership patterns. This complexity depends on—and begins with—the history of Indigenous dispossession but subsequent …

Housing Hipsters: Adapting The Spirit Of Hipster Antitrust To Address Wealth Asymmetries Between Corporate Residential Properties And Cost-Burdened Residents, Beth Brodsky

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Sean Gotcher, a real estate agent for 11 years, went viral on TikTok with a real estate hypothetical.1 Gotcher asked how weird society would be if a billion-dollar company collected data on what people would be willing to pay for housing by zip code and then use that information to buy under the market-rate in order to sell above the market rate.2 He wondered how weird it would be if this company bought 31 homes in a two-mile radius to sell for a profit of $1.2 million within a year.3 Zillow inspired this scenario. 4 After Gotcher’s TikTok video received …

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On The Tenant's Obligation To Pay The Rent: A Study Under Palestinian And Kuwaiti Laws, Ramz Bassam Abusalama Mss., Ibrahim Khalid Yahya Mr.

UAEU Law Journal

The research sought to clarify the impact of the (Covid- 19) pandemic on the tenant's obligation to pay the rent, as it is an obligation imposed by the general rules in leasing, and it allows the lessor to invoke the termination of the contract in real estate subject to the rule of civil law (general rules), or to vacate the leased property in real estate subject to the Jordanian Landlords and Tenants Law of 1953 in force in the West Bank in Palestine, or the Kuwaiti Tenancy Law of 1978. In order to avoid annulment or vacancy, the research analyzes …

Balancing The Inequities In Applying Natural Property Rights To Rights In Real Or Intellectual Property, Lolita Darden

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Eric Claeys’s book, Natural Property Rights, introduces a Lockean-based theory of interest-based natural property rights. Central to Claeys’s theory are the concepts of justified interests and productive use. A justified interest, Claeys writes, exists when an individual demonstrates a stronger interest in a resource than anyone else in the community and uses the resource productively in a manner that is “intelligent, purposeful, value-creating, . . . sociable,” and leads to survival or flourishing. Claeys’s theory demonstrates “how a standard justification for property gets implemented in practice” and how a community’s “goods” build on the individual’s goods.

Claeys’s community “goods” focus, …

How Far Does Natural Law Protect Private Property?, James W. Ely Jr.

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article first explores the ambiguous relationship between natural law and the rights of property owners in American history. It points out that invocation of natural law principles was frequently conflated with English common law guarantees of property rights in the Revolutionary Era. Reliance on natural law as a source of protection for private property faded during the nineteenth century and was largely rejected in the early twentieth century.

The Article then considers the extent to which natural law principles are useful in addressing contemporary issues relating to eminent domain and police power regulation of private property. Taking a skeptical …

The Natural Right Of Property, Timothy Sandefur

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article offers a critical examination of Eric Claeys’s argument for natural property rights, focusing in particular on the questions of self-ownership and the so-called “Lockean proviso.” It argues that while Claeys is generally on the right track in his argument for natural property rights, he errs in omitting a self-ownership argument, some version of which is necessary for a proper naturalistic account of property, and that the Lockean proviso is neither necessary for such an account nor defensible in its own right. I conclude that the concerns animating the Lockean proviso argument are adequately dealt with by an alternative …

Ad Coelum And The Design Of Property Rights, Joseph A. Schremmer

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article seizes on a specific doctrinal discussion in Eric Claeys’s Natural Property Rights to argue for the importance of understanding property doctrines in the context of a system of interconnecting rules and standards and not in isolation. The ad coelum doctrine provides that land ownership entails ownership of the suprajacent airspace as well as the underlying subsurface. As Claeys’s discussion highlights, scholars disagree about the significance of ad coelum both conceptually, as to what function the rule serves in defining and allocating property, and normatively. It is only by viewing ad coelum in the context of how it interacts …

Natural Property Rights: A Reply, Eric R. Claeys

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Reply concludes the symposium hosted by the Texas A&M University Journal of Property Law on the author’s forthcoming book Natural Property Rights. The Reply shows how natural law and rights apply to a wide range of doctrinal examples raised in this symposium—including business associations, correlative oil rights, timber extraction, sinking coastlands, water law, nuisance law, property rights in subsurface minerals, and the issues about sovereignty and property disposition associated with Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823). The Reply also addresses a wide range of skeptical objections to natural law—especially the arguments that it relies too much on intuitions and …

Natural Property Rights: An Introduction, Eric R. Claeys

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article introduces a symposium hosted by the Texas A&M University Journal of Property Law. The symposium is on a forthcoming book, and in that book the author introduces and defends a theory of property relying on labor, natural rights, and mine-run principles of natural law. Parts I and II of the Article preview the main claims of the book, summarizing part by part and chapter by chapter.

The rest of the Article illustrates how the theory introduced in the book applies to a contemporary resource dispute. The Article studies an ongoing lawsuit styled Campo v. United States, now …

Natural Law, Assumptions, And Humility, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This review of Natural Property Rights celebrates Eric Claeys’s efforts to resuscitate natural law as a viable approach to property law. Although readers unlikely to be convinced that natural law is the way to best understand property rights, Claeys succeeds in breathing new life into natural law. Natural Property Rights’ emphasis on use as property law’s fundamental value creates space to reconceptualize the rights of property owners and the place of non-owners within a just theory of property rights. The main critiques of Natural Property Rights offered in this review center around the choice to prioritize rights over duties and …

A Theoretical Justification For Treating The Contract For Deed As A Mortgage, Matthew J. Blaney

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Millions of Americans finance their home using the treacherous contract for deed. Denied access to the conventional mortgage, the contract for deed often is the only alternative for Americans seeking the stability of homeownership. Historically, however, this deceptive financing device disrupted the lives of thousands of individuals by forfeiting their property and all payments made on the contract—even where only one installment was overdue. Low-income Americans and immigrant families disproportionately experience the brunt of the contract for deed. Furthermore, as Americans experience rising prices and increasing financial instability, there is reason to fear sellers—equipped with insight into lenders’ former mistakes—could …

Until The Cows Come Home: Ancillary Probate Reform Is Needed Across The Country To Better Serve Farmers And Ranchers, Emily K. Daniel

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Property law has long established a difference between real and personal property. When an individual dies, if they owned real property in another state, they may be subject to the other state’s probate or estates code. This means that the decedent’s beneficiaries may have to probate the estate again in the secondary state’s courts if the statutes state that is a requirement. This secondary probate proceeding is called ancillary probate. This Article aims to show the negative effects that ancillary probate has on certain people and industries. Specifically, ancillary probate is a problem that negatively affects farmers and ranchers across …