New Article: Emily A. Prifogle & Jessica Shoemaker, Rural and Racialized: Property Law Perpetuates Racial Disparities, LPE, (March 14, 2023). Excerpt below:
So says one of the leading property law casebooks, read by countless law students and professors. By boldly declaring that “farmland…and the like” only “used to be important,” this text gives voice to a perspective that we often encounter in our respective work on property law and rural landscapes: an erasure of the needs of living rural communities in popular discourse and a bias toward the urban in legal scholarship, perhaps especially in property-law literature.
Nowhere is this bias more evident than in discussions of race and racial inequality. Elsewhere, property scholars have done good and important work on the relationship between property law and the construction of racial difference. We know well, for instance, how property law has been used throughout history to direct valuable resources to white European settlers and their descendants. Indeed, one of this country’s earliest and most persistent legal projects has been to justify a western expansion of white land ownership, facilitated in turn by acts of colonialism, slavery, and explicit race-based exclusion in property law. And, now, property law remains complicit in and sometimes actively perpetuates ongoing race-based wealth disparities.
Poverty Law 