The Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing is currently considering two bills that would revive rent control in the state. The first bill caps rent increases for not-owner-occupied residential housing at the CPI not to exceed 5%, with an income eligibility proviso. The second much more ambitious bill authorizes localities to choose among a…
A few years ago I travelled to central Ghana, in the fertile farmlands west of Lake Volta. A global land rush was in full swing: large agribusiness plantation deals – “land grabs” for the critics – were announced at a dizzying pace in many low- and middle-income countries. This transition belt between Ghana’s forest zone…
Laws take. It’s what they’re for. Taxes take dollars from some people and distribute them to other people. Traffic laws take away drivers’ opportunity to speed through intersections. Zoning restrictions take from neighbors their ability to build apartments in their backyards. Talk to me about a law’s requirements and you’ll be talking about a taking.…
The Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act of 1968 is a shocking example of governmental policies shaping “markets,” or, rather, supporting investors to extract wealth from segregated black communities.
The history of black banking, even for its many failures, holds a unique perspective on property and its contradictions of value. It also contains a deep lesson about how economic strategies generate and are reinforced by affective practices—and how racist economic laws rested on public feelings of their own.
I teach in a law school where most students and faculty pride themselves on falling somewhere along a spectrum of progressive, extremely progressive, socialist, and left anarchist. Thus, every year, usually within the first month of starting my first-semester property law course, I find myself surprised that the vast majority of my students appear to…
Each year teaching Property Law, I have taught many of the big cases and topics on race and property law, such as M’Intosh and Dred Scott; segregationist turbulence in rights of reasonable access; public accommodations law; racially restrictive covenants; the Fair Housing Act. I never quite had a cohesive idea about this—they each seemed formative.…
I recently interviewed a man in a weakened rural town who makes sausages for a local meat packing business on the 3am shift. He told me about a homeless woman who had come to the meat shop one dark morning with blood-soaked hands. Delirious with cold and exhaustion, she had punched in the glass on…
In my last post, I argued that property law needs to tell new stories, and in doing so, a key benefit would be that we would “uncover” the relationship between property and equality. In this second post, I will turn to another benefit to using narrative as a teaching tool–the ability to “frame” abstract concepts…
My teaching in Property Law is shaped by stories (if I am feeling fancy, I call them narratives). Whether true, false, or fictive (to borrow Carlos Ginzburg’s wonderful delineation), narratives enrich my teaching in property law because they offer a way to interrogate how property regimes manifest political, social and economic hierarchies within different societies.…
Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written that “we are faced with the ascendance of anti-state state actors: people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power.” This tendency surfaced in the wake of the economic and legitimacy crisis of liberal capitalism in the 1970s, and has gained strength in the decades since, taking hold…
“Certainly if we view the common law on the eve of reform, we see the spirit of Heath Robinson at his most extravagant. … It is a real question why nobody before Bentham was provoked, and a part of the answer is that nobody before Blackstone described the system as a whole.” S.F.C. Milson, Historical…
I wasn’t at all sure what to do after I was first asked to teach 1L Property Law. Not only was it an unexpected addition to my courseload, my background was in legal history and critical theory on the one side and in international law on the other, and the idea of picking up a…
When James Grimmelmann, Jeremy Sheff, Mike Grynberg, Steve Clowney and I decided to write an open source property casebook that could be shared freely with students, one of the benefits was the ability to teach the material in ways that made sense to us. The mortgage chapter, for example, is actually the “foreclosure” chapter: it…
A few years ago, I set out somewhat deliberately to publically out myself as being at the far left extreme when it comes to property law scholarship. I attacked progressive property scholarship from the left and attacked information theorists as rationalizing the status quo. So perhaps it is surprising that my 1L Property class is…
