Mobility, Good; Stability, Better
Marissa Jackson Sow
When communities in this country confront environmental degradation, economic precarity, housing insecurity, discrimination, or state violence, the proposed solution is typically related to mobility. People are told to move to another neighborhood, another city, another state, or even another country if they want to experience more favorable living conditions, rather than fighting for better conditions where they are. The assumption underlying these recommendations is that mobility is both available and desirable. The prevailing focus on the right to move has largely overshadowed the equally critical right to not have to move at all.
The modern United States is built upon histories of forced migration, displacement, and dispossession. Indigenous communities were removed from ancestral lands. Black Americans were subjected to slavery, racial terror, urban renewal, highway construction projects, and gentrification. Immigrant communities continue to experience legal and economic pressures that destabilize their rootedness and belonging. Across these contexts, mobility has often functioned less as a form of freedom than as a response to vulnerability.
While the rights of mobility enable people to seek and find work, the right to stay means familial and communal stability and the ability to accumulate capital—including capital that can be bequeathed to future generations. Private law—such as the law of wills and trusts, contracts, property, and even employment—works together with public policy to play a central role in undermining the ability of poor communities and communities of color to stay put while simultaneously concretizing the presence and legacies of high-wealth people and families.
In the following roundtable—which came out of a panel at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association—Allison Tait, Carla Spivack, Alina Ball, Juan Carlos Ibarra, and Carliss Chatman champion a meaningful right to stay and imagine what it would look like if private law were used to support poor, working-class, disabled, queer, trans, Indigenous, immigrant, and Black people and families in creating durable communities and ensuring the ability to stay in them.
Wealth Makes Rootedness Possible
Allison Tait & Carla Spivack
Inheritance law amplifies existing patterns, practices, and possibilities that determine whether individuals can exercise a right to stay. If there is debt in a family, inheritance can compound it. If there is wealth, inheritance will protect it. The right to stay, unevenly distributed to begin with, is further shaped by the legal rules that govern family money.
Nowhere is this clearer than in how the law treats inheritance at the bottom of the wealth spectrum. One of us (Carla) has discussed elsewhere the dispossession that results from heirs property and the land loss to both Black and Indigenous families that heirs property has produced. In addition, rather than transmitting security, inheritance can become the trigger for a state’s collection efforts. Medicaid estate recovery, for example, converts a family home into collateral for long-term healthcare costs, often without the family realizing the exposure exists until a lien or a bill for tens of thousands of dollars arrives after death. And while a surviving spouse cannot be evicted from the family home, a decedent’s children can be evicted if the state takes the home to recover costs.
The debt of a beneficiary can also impact inheritance and the right to stay. Consider Teresa Beatty, a Connecticut resident who inherited a portion of her mother’s home where she had lived with her brother and her children. The only problem was that she also received a bill for $83,762.26, a “pay-to-stay” fee. Two decades before her mother’s death, Beatty served a two-year prison sentence, and now at the moment of inheritance, the state sought to recoup the cost of her incarceration. (More than half of states authorize this incarceration-cost recoupment mechanism.)
At the other end of the spectrum, the asset-protection trust used by high-wealth families performs the inverse operation. Where debt, liens, and forced sales convert inheritance into instability, the trust converts inheritance into permanence. A trust can hold a family home indefinitely, insulated from the claims of individual beneficiaries’ creditors, divorces, or improvident decisions, so that occupancy continues across generations without the property ever passing through a vulnerable moment of individual ownership. The same trust can also contain a no-sale provision that disallows any trust beneficiary or trustee from selling the property. Trust-held wealth is rooted and impermeable, creating forever homes that house and enrich family members in every generation.
The irony of this wealth is that, while it enables a robust right to stay, the wealth itself is also highly mobile, crossing state lines and traveling overseas. Families are not bound to the trust law of the state where the property sits; they can select the jurisdiction whose rules best amplify continuity, for example, a state with no Rule Against Perpetuities, one with a favorable decanting statute, or a tax haven state with strong asset-protection laws. South Dakota, Delaware, and Nevada compete openly for this business, marketing their statutes to trust companies as lures and to estate planners as products. The result is that the wealthy not only have a right to stay that is legally secured but one that is jurisdictionally optimized. High-wealth families can shop for permanence the way others shop for a mortgage rate, while a family losing a home to a tax lien has no comparable ability to select a friendlier legal regime. Private law, in this way, both protects wealth and lets wealth choose its own rules for staying put.
Placed side by side, these stories serve as mirror images of the same legal architecture. The tools are structurally similar (trusts, liens, fiduciary claims, jurisdictional choice), but the direction of their force depends on where a family lives along the wealth spectrum. For some, inheritance comes in the form of an eviction notice, and for others, it arrives in jurisdictionally optimized trust documents. The unequal structure of inheritance rules ensures that an initially unequal distribution of the right to stay persists across time.
Community Is Infrastructure
Alina Ball
Much of American law and public policy assumes a highly portable model of family life. Mobility is often imagined as a straightforward matter of moving a nuclear household from one place to another. Yet that assumption obscures the realities of many communities. Most people do not live their lives as isolated individuals, but as members of families, neighborhoods, congregations, and communities.
For many people of color, immigrant communities, and working-class communities, family structures are far more geographically and economically interconnected. Grandparents provide childcare. Adult children support aging parents. Cousins share household and transportation responsibilities. Church communities function as economic safety nets. Friendships become caregiving structures. Indeed, community itself is the infrastructure that helps them survive the racial wealth gap.
Understood this way, home is not merely a matter of personal preference or sentimental attachment. It is part of a broader ecosystem of care, survival, and mutual support. Consider, for instance, the impact of ICE’s immigration raids. These campaigns of terror do not simply affect those directly targeted by ICE agents. They produce cascading effects throughout entire communities. Out of fear of ICE, people stay home, stop spending money, and no longer feel safe in their communities, which in turn affects local businesses, tax revenues, and municipal services. The devastation of an individual’s displacement quickly escalates into a community-wide economic crisis, bringing small businesses to the brink of bankruptcy and causing staff layoffs.
When we conceive of protecting a right to stay, we need to think not only about how to defend individuals from removal, but also about protecting the social and economic infrastructure that makes stable community life possible. Transactional legal representation for small businesses in ICE-targeted neighborhoods demonstrates how private law protects a community’s right to stay. With legal counsel, businesses can clarify financial obligations, renegotiate lease and vendor terms, and restructure operations to mitigate risks, better positioning them to navigate economic damage caused by ICE. By fortifying these commercial anchors to maintain employment and essential services, private law translates a right to community preservation into reality.
A meaningful right to stay also requires a habitable natural environment. In my work with communities that are confronting water contamination, it has become clear that access to safe drinking water is much more than an environmental issue. Indeed, it is a prerequisite for health, economic stability, and habitability itself. Even communities that successfully secure housing or own their real property may find those victories rendered meaningless if the underlying environment becomes unlivable. Absent environmental protections, communities are left with rather hollow legal victories where the right to stay is undermined by the actual inhabitability of the physical space that forces them to move to satisfy a need as basic as clean water.
When a community experiencing environmental degradation seeks to acquire and finance capital improvements for its water system, it must draw upon a broad range of private law mechanisms. While private law is no substitute for robust environmental protections, leveraging private law tools can mean the difference between realizing a community’s right to stay and being forced to relocate.
Operationalizing the right to stay requires attention not only to the most visible forms of displacement, but also to the conditions that make communal life possible. A community cannot remain rooted if their local economy is disrupted by federal occupation or the conditions necessary for life are systematically eroded or extracted by industry.
Stability Is Produced by Law
Juan Carlos Ibarra
What legal, economic, environmental, and social conditions allow individuals, families, and communities to remain rooted over time? From a private law perspective, answering that question requires attention to the underlying legal rules and institutions that make rootedness possible or precarious.
Displacement often happens quietly, through ordinary legal rules that appear neutral and technical on their face but that structure continuity, authority, and access to stability over time and can make instability and dispossession legally permissible outcomes. This highlights an uncomfortable truth: private law does not simply allocate legal entitlements. It also structures stability.
Heirs’ property illustrates how these background rules operate. When a landowner dies, the land often passes to several family members as tenants in common, each holding an undivided share of the whole. This happens most often when there is no will and the rules of intestate succession divide the land among heirs, but a will that leaves land to a group, such as “my children,” produces a comparable result. With each generation, the number of owners can multiply. Any one of them, or an outsider who buys a single owner’s share, can ask a court to partition the property, and courts often order the land sold rather than divided. A family can thus lose its land even though most of its members want to keep it and no one has formally violated a legal right: the petitioning co-owner has simply exercised a right that every co-owner holds.
The resulting losses are profound. Families lose homes, land, community ties, intergenerational stability, and rootedness—losses that have fallen especially heavily on Black families in the South, though not on them alone. Yet property law frequently treats those outcomes not as legally cognizable harms, but as lawful consequences of existing property arrangements. That gap between the losses experienced by many families and legally cognizable injury raises a deeper question about which forms of stability property law is designed to protect.
The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, now adopted in more than two dozen jurisdictions, has made important changes. It prioritizes dividing the land over selling it, lets the other co-owners buy out a co-owner who seeks a sale, and requires courts to weigh the family’s ties to the land before ordering one. But it leaves the foundational legal structure in place: any co-owner, or anyone who buys a share, can still put the land at risk of sale, and the family’s ties remain factors to be weighed rather than a limit on sale. A meaningful right to stay may therefore require reconsidering baseline rules that privilege exit and alienability over continuity, residence, and intergenerational stability.
Treating these losses as legally cognizable harms would mean counting displacement, instability, and the loss of family land as injuries in their own right: harm to community and intergenerational stability would become a reason to deny sale, not just a factor a court may find outweighed. It could also support reforms of the kind scholars have proposed: permitting a court-ordered sale only with the consent of a supermajority of co-owners, limiting speculators’ ability to buy a small share and sue for partition, funding buyouts or preferential financing for heirs who want to keep family land, and replacing tenancy in common with a family land trust as the default form of ownership for inherited family land. The aim is not only to make partition fairer, but to change which losses the law recognizes in the first place.
The right to stay, then, depends not only on preventing dramatic acts of removal, but on the baseline of legal entitlements that decide whose stability the law protects and whose vulnerability it treats as normal.
Mobility Is Not Always Freedom
Carliss N. Chatman
American legal culture frequently treats movement as evidence of autonomy and choice, focusing on the right and ability of individuals to contract for employment and other forms of property. Yet for many communities, that much-celebrated inclusion, fought for during the Civil Rights movements, is predatory. When predatory inclusion is at play, mobility reflects vulnerability rather than freedom.
The history of the United States provides countless examples of this, including forced migration under slavery, Indigenous removal, racial terror during Jim Crow, urban renewal projects and highway construction, and gentrification. Each forced displacement disrupted communities and undermined opportunities for wealth accumulation.
Wealth accumulation often depends on continuity: remaining in place long enough to build businesses, maintain networks, transfer property, cultivate political power, and establish intergenerational stability. Repeated displacement interrupts those processes; indeed, repeated displacements of Black communities in the United States through governments’ urban renewal and gentrification schemes have functioned as wealth extraction mechanisms. The right to stay should thus be conceived as a framework for understanding how the law allocates stability, and thus how it distributes the benefits that follow in stability’s wake.
Perhaps less obviously, stability is also necessary to realize the value that underlies freedom of movement. While mobility can certainly be empowering—a chance to pursue new opportunities and adventures—it is only so if the choice to leave is voluntary, if one can remain in place without sacrificing opportunity, dignity, safety, or belonging.
Law does not, of course, distribute or protect rootedness equally. Instead, the law privileges some people’s inheritance of permanence and renders some communities vulnerable to repeated loss. Some forms of continuity are protected, while others are routinely sacrificed in the name of markets, development, efficiency, or flexibility.
A Conclusion and A Beginning
The authors of this roundtable agree that feasibility too often functions less as a neutral assessment of practical limits than as a reflection of existing power arrangements. Equality and justice are always cast as impossible until progress is demanded, while ideas once considered impossible routinely become possible when they serve existing concentrations of wealth and power. The boundaries of feasibility are political and are the function of hegemony: those in power will dictate the parameters of the achievable until they meet resistance.
Operationalizing the right to stay requires radically rethinking property, contracts, inheritance, environmental governance, and wealth distribution. How much should feasibility constrain our imagination?
Exercising radical imagination is a form of counter-power building. The purpose of imagination is not to generate utopian proposals, however. Rather, imagination allows for the creation of new ways of thinking, organizing, legislating, and representing clients.
In thinking about the right to stay and beyond, we urge readers to join us in resisting pragmatism and embracing fearless brainstorming and experimentation.
