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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

A resource guide developed by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Saint Louis University Law School

Home Ownership

Goodman, Laurie S., and Christopher Mayer. 2018. "Homeownership and the American Dream." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32 (1): 31-58.

From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 505 (2001) by Thomas W. Mitchell

Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss, 66 Ala. L. Rev. 1 (2014) by Thomas W. Mitchell

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
Call Number: E185.61 .R8185 2017
ISBN: 9781631492853
Publication Date: 2017
From W. W. Norton & Company Inc. "Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods."

Goodman, Laurie S., and Christopher Mayer. 2018. "Homeownership and the American Dream." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32 (1): 31-58.

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From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 505 (2001) by Thomas W. Mitchell

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Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss, 66 Ala. L. Rev. 1 (2014) by Thomas W. Mitchell

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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

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Goodman, Laurie S., and Christopher Mayer. 2018. "Homeownership and the American Dream." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32 (1): 31-58.

-

From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 505 (2001) by Thomas W. Mitchell

-

Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss, 66 Ala. L. Rev. 1 (2014) by Thomas W. Mitchell

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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

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Goodman, Laurie S., and Christopher Mayer. 2018. "Homeownership and the American Dream." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32 (1): 31-58.

discussion of racially restrictive covenants

From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 505 (2001) by Thomas W. Mitchell

discussion of racially restrictive covenants

Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss, 66 Ala. L. Rev. 1 (2014) by Thomas W. Mitchell

forced partition sales of tenancy-in-common properties

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that have continued into the twenty-first century

Goodman, Laurie S., and Christopher Mayer. 2018. "Homeownership and the American Dream." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32 (1): 31-58.

Diversity Readings Related to First-Year Courses-Home Ownership

From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 505 (2001) by Thomas W. Mitchell

Diversity Readings Related to First-Year Courses-Home Ownership

Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss, 66 Ala. L. Rev. 1 (2014) by Thomas W. Mitchell

Diversity Readings Related to First-Year Courses-Home Ownership

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

Diversity Readings Related to First-Year Courses-Home Ownership

Goodman, Laurie S., and Christopher Mayer. 2018. "Homeownership and the American Dream." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32 (1): 31-58.

-

From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 505 (2001) by Thomas W. Mitchell

-

Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss, 66 Ala. L. Rev. 1 (2014) by Thomas W. Mitchell

"Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales."

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

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Property

Dignity Takings in Gangland's Suburban Frontier
Abstract
This paper engages the evolving dignity takings framework, first developed by Bernadette Atuahene, in the context of contemporary American street gangs (e.g. Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, etc.). Contrary to most popular accounts, it starts with a re-imagined and complicated notion of street gangs that emphasizes not their secondary or tertiary violence and criminality but their primary function as corporate institutions engaged in the sustained, transgressive creation of alternative markets for the creation of the types of property interests that scholars have associated with the development and pursuit of identity and “person-hood.” From this perspective, the paper applies the dignity takings analysis to public nuisance abatement actions (commonly known as gang injunctions), which have become standard tools in the national gang strategy. These civil mechanisms enjoin the conduct and activities of the gangs, as unincorporated entities, and prohibit named individuals (including but not limited to known and suspected gang members) from engaging in a panoply of otherwise legal activities: displaying gang symbols, wearing clothing or colors associated with a gang, possessing tools or objects capable of defacing real or personal property (e.g. pens), appearing in public view with a known gang member. Through qualitative analyses of interviews, court documents, and political hearings, the paper identifies a special form of dehumanization and infantilization that it refers to as "adultization," which demonstrates that the dispossession of identity property associated with suburban gang injunctions depresses self- esteem, erodes self-confidence, damages identity and feelings of community worth, and dehumanizes enjoined individuals in a way that deprives them of their fundamental right of dignity, constituting a clear example of a dignity taking.

Keywords: Dignity Taking, Takings, Property, Property Theory, Gangs, Injunctions, Qualitative, Identity
Conquest and Slavery in the Property Law Course: Notes for Teachers
Abstract
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.

Keywords: property law, legal history, curriculum, slavery