Dirt Law

Yesterday (yes, April Fool’s Day), we returned to William and Mary Law School to help the student-run Real Estate Law Society wrap up its event year. The putative title of our talk was “Hot Topics in Property Law”, but we covered a wider range, including Dirt Law issues to be on the lookout for at the Supreme Court, a century of zoning, career paths in property law (litigation, transactional, academic, for example, and what the hiring market looks like), and some general musings. …
Continue Reading William & Mary Law School’s Real Estate Law Society

Check out this cert petition filed yesterday. It’s from our shop, so we’re not going to be commenting much. The issue is one that the Supreme Court has expressed an interest in, but the last time it was before the Court a few years ago, the Justices decided to wait for the next case. Well, here’s the next case.
Continue Reading New Cert Petition: Do Indian Tribes Have Greater Sovereign Immunity Than Other Governments?

We’re spending the day at the alma mater, talking alongside some of the luminaries in the field (lawprofs Thomas Mitchell, Henry Smith, John Inafranca, Thomas Merrill, and Pamela Sameulson, among others) about our favorite topics: dirt law and property rights. This is the “Future of Property Rights” Conference that we mentioned not long ago at the University of Hawaii Law School. …
Continue Reading 2026 Future of Property Law Conference, University of Hawaii Law School

Check it out, an in-progress piece from lawprof Molly Brady, “Property v. Guns: The Level-of-Generality Problem in Wolford.”

This delves into the issue we posted about last week, the Second Amendment and the right to exclude, an issue argued recently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Continue Reading New Article (Lawprof Molly Brady): “Property v. Guns: The Level-of-Generality Problem in Wolford”

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Too busy writing those briefs and petitioning for those writs, so haven’t found the time to hit your local store or the interwebs and fulfill your seasonal duties? Or maybe you just have gifter’s block this holiday season about an appropriate present for the dirt lawyer in your life?

You want to be known as…

As we wrap up another year, it’s time to look ahead to the one event that always gets our eminent domain blood pumping: the annual ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Litigation Conference. Details, including faculty list, a complete agenda, and registration information is posted here.

Now in its 43rd year, this flagship gathering…

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As you already know, registration is also underway for the 22d Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference, October 23-24, 2025, at the William and Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The Conference is expressly designed to get legal academics and the nation’s best dirt law practitioners in the same room, discussing how legal scholarship and law…