Critical Perspectives for Law Teaching: Property

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not "control the black dollar" due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps. Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. Examining the fruits of past policies and the operation of banking in a segregated economy, she makes clear that only bolder, more realistic views of banking's relation to black communities will end the cycle of poverty and promote black wealth.

See chapter on critical race theory and property

One of the most acclaimed books of our time, this modern classic "has set a new standard for reporting on poverty" (Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review). In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as "wrenching and revelatory" (The Nation), "vivid and unsettling" (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America's most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.  NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY President Barack Obama * The New York Times Book Review * The Boston Globe * The Washington Post * NPR * Entertainment Weekly * The New Yorker * Bloomberg * Esquire * BuzzFeed * Fortune * San Francisco Chronicle * Milwaukee Journal Sentinel * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * Politico * The Week * Chicago Public Library * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal *  Publishers Weekly * Booklist * Shelf Awareness WINNER OF: The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction * The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction * The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction * The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism * The PEN/New England Award * The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE AND THE KIRKUS PRIZE "Evicted stands among the very best of the social justice books."--Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Commonwealth  "Gripping and moving--tragic, too."--Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones "Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty."--San Francisco Chronicle

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. Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race provides a dynamic social, historical, and doctrinal context for teaching property law: nearly 30 new and provocative cases including the Supreme Court decision in Oyama v. California (alien land laws) and state court and federal court decisions in Trueheart v. Parker and Morison v. Rawlinson (race nuisance cases involving a jazz club and an African American church) extensive treatment of Federal civil rights statutes and their implications for environmental justice and the housing and financial crisis a close look at the efficacy of traditional property concepts as solutions to minority or cultural requirements such as easements by prescription for Native American religious uses (United States v. Platt), Native Hawaiian access to sacred sites and beaches ( PASH), and the impact of partition land sales on African-American farmers and indigenous communities consideration of an international perspective, including cases on land redistribution in South Africa, cultural property in Australia, and restitution in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina and Guatemala legal context and appropriate pedagogy from statutes, excerpted law review articles, and questions for discussion in the notes Teacher's Manual that provides additional questions and suggestions for linking the cases to coverage in traditional casebooks Timely and relevant, Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race brings a whole new dimension to your Property course. If you re looking to refresh your teaching experience, challenge your students, or fuel class discussion, order a complimentary copy of Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race.