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…
I wrote a lot about Property between 2005 and 2010. I came to the topic as a new law professor because it struck me as something like constitutional law for the economy: the basic arrangement of power, cooperation, and legitimacy. The writing I did then was about how property law creates the terms on which…
A third vantage point from which to consider Fant v Ferguson is legal geography: the way that racism and capitalism over time shape create and maintain physical spaces through processes of investment and disinvestment, development and underdevelopment, displacement and settlement. A key way into this story – as Audrey MacFarlane notes – is through the history of racial segregation in housing markets.
New York City recently became the first jurisdiction in the United States to guarantee a right to counsel for poor people at risk of eviction. This was an important step in the fight for equal access to the courts, and a significant victory for tenant advocates who had waged a decades-long campaign to ensure fairness…
