Teaching the Law School Curriculum - Institute for Law Teaching ...

336 Property
tently for a few classes. Students catch on that I am going to do it, and by the second or third week most will
have taken the time at least to look up the terms before coming to class. I obviously do less of this as the semester
progresses, both because of time and because if I have not made the point to the students by then I
never will.
Basil Mattingly, Georgia State University College of Law
I spend at least the first half hour having students tell me what “property” is. This invariably generates a list
of lay and legal notions of property, which I write on the board, trying to segregate the lay (property as “things,”
mostly) from the legal (property as “rights”). As the discussion wraps up, I introduce the notion that whether
someone has that relationship to something and to other people which we call a “property” relationship is a conclusion
of law, not a matter of fact. We spend the rest of the class talking about M’Intosh v. Johnson, which confirms
that whether something is property or not is a conclusion of law, not a matter of fact (among other things).
My purpose in the first couple of weeks, beginning with the first class, is to unsettle their pre-existing notion of
“property.”
Patrick Wiseman, Georgia State University College of Law
I start with the topic of trespass and limitations to the right to exclude. I use the traditional case of State v.
Shack, which holds that ownership of property does not entitle a farm owner to exclude a doctor and a lawyer
from coming on the property to provide services to migrant farm workers. I then discuss the problem of investigative
journalism, focusing on the Food Lion and Desnick cases, where the television show Prime Time Live lied
in order to gain entrance to property. The question is whether the fraudulent statements mean that the consent
to enter the property was ineffective, making the entries trespassory. These issues focus on one of the core rights
property owners have (the right to exclude) and on situations in which the owner has opened the property to
others so that those others (visitors, tenants, customers of the business, or news agencies) might or might not
have rights to enter the property against the will of the owner. The cases are intended to show that every one of
the core rights has exceptions and that the use of the property may justify protecting either tenants or the public
by allowing access against the owner’s wishes.
This topic is also intended as part of an initial introduction to the legal system. I start with a criminal case,
then a common law case. The next day I move to other common law cases, then to state and federal public accommodations
statutes, and finally to state and federal constitutional rights of access to property under the First
Amendment. This demonstrates how one issue (right to exclude v. right of access) is regulated by various sources
of law: federal and state, statutory (civil and criminal), and common law. The public accommodations materials
and the free speech cases also show how property rights are related to fundamental rights and the basic structure
of social relations.
Not Knowing the Answer
Brief Gems
Joseph William Singer, Harvard University Law School
I have some standard advice I give to new teachers. The thing I think most new teachers worry about is not
knowing the answer to a question. I tell them not to worry about this problem. The students may think we know
the answer to everything but we don’t and lawyers in the real world don’t. Their questions are usually about situations
different from those in the cases they read in the book and the point is that it is never crystal clear that
courts will apply the cases the same way when a fact is different, or if they will distinguish the case. There may