Alfred L. Brophy, Alberto Lopez, and Kali N. Murray, Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race (Austin: Wolters Kluwer, 2011)From publisher: "Description
Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race enables you to seamlessly integrate historical and contemporary issues of race and ethnicity into your Property syllabus alongside your casebook. With historical perspective and doctrinal analysis, it maps the directions in which property law has turned in response to issues of race and ethnicity, and demonstrates how racial and ethnic categories continue to affect contemporary property law."
Bethany Berger, Property to Race/Race to Property (April 12, 2021) (Available at SSRN)Racial relationships have shaped property law in the U.S. The power to foreclose for debts, the power of local governments to zone, the public goods attached to residence, the scope of the welfare state’s “new property”—in these areas to control, exclude, and take from racialized groups changed what property means today. This Article reveals the hidden histories of racially neutral rules & shows how they have undermined the security & equitable distribution of property.
Florence Wagman Roisman, Teaching About Inequality, Race, and Property, 46 St. Louis U.L.J. 665 (2002)"This Article surveys the extent and causes of racial inequality with respect to control over property, specifically the particularly striking aspect of the inequality: that it “is clearly color-coded.” While this “color-coding” exists internationally as well as domestically, the focus of this Article is on the United States where minorities, and in particular African-Americans control substantially less property than whites."
Joseph William Singer, Indian Title: Unraveling the Racial Context of Property Rights, or How to Stop Engaging in Conquest, 10 Alb. Gov't L. Rev. 1 (2017)Most property law students learn about Indian title by reading the 1823 case of Johnson v. M'Intosh4 as part of their introductory property law course. While it is a good thing that they learn about the topic, most of them learn the law incorrectly. This is not their fault; they learn a distorted picture of Indian title because many property law teachers also misunderstand the case. Teachers misunderstand the case partly because Chief Justice John Marshall uses archaic terminology and partly because most casebook authors do not provide the historical and legal context necessary to interpret the holding correctly.5 It is important to understand what Indian title really is-- not only to appreciate the historical genesis of American property rights--but to ensure equal and adequate protection for the property rights of the hundreds of Indian nations that continue to own and govern their own property today.
K-Sue Park, "Conquest and Slavery in the Property Law Course: Notes for Teachers" in Forthcoming In The Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States (Devon Carbado et al. eds., 2020)"This piece contains ideas for teaching about the foundational place of the histories of conquest and slavery to American property law and the property law course. I begin by briefly reviewing how these topics have been erased and marginalized from the study of American property law, as mentioned by casebooks in the field published from the late nineteenth century
to the present. I then show how the history of conquest constituted the context in which the singular American land system and traditional theories of acquisition developed, before turning to the history of the American slave trade and the long history of resistance to Black landownership that its abolition fueled. Here, I suggest ways to correct for the tendency of traditional property law curricula to focus exclusively on English doctrines regulating relations between neighbors, rather than the unique fruits of the colonial experiment -- the land system that underpins its real estate market and its structural reliance on racial violence to produce value.