Estates in Land: Present Interests, Future Interests and Cotenancies

Having explored the various rights that attach once something is recognized as property, we will now examine the various ways that those rights can be sliced and diced to divide up ownership.  Much of this law has its roots in feudalism, but the ramifications are still of great importance today.  One area where this really matters is the issue of "heirs property," This term refers to what happens to real property when the owner dies without a will (a tactic relied upon predominantly by Black landowners in the South). Heirs property creates a profound social justice issue. 

Between the end of the Civil War and 1920, African Americans held title to nearly 20 million acres of land in the United States. However, over the past 90 years, most of that land has been transfered ut of Black hands.  There are many reasons for this dramatic change, including acts of violence and terror against Black landowners that drove them off their property, illegal conduct by unscrupulous  lawyers, and rampant discrimination against black farmers by the USDA.

One additional driver of this dispossession is the systematic exclusion of Black landowners from the legal system (whether due to income or discrimination) and the well-founded distrust many Black landowners had of that system.

Because land is one of the primary drivers of intergenerational wealth transfers in the US, the results of this shift have been widespread and calamatous. 

In 2000, Prof. Thomas Mitchell was awarded a MacArther grant for his work on remedying the problems created by 'heirs property.' To learn more, read http://hprc.southerncoalition.org/?q=node/5.