A Web-based graphic design company that intends to design custom websites for customers planning weddings sought to place a statement explaining the owner's intent not to serve same-sex couples. A federal court has held that this violates the state's public accommodations law because it constitutes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. ...
Vermont's marketable title act, Vt. Stat. tit. 27, §604(a), allows preservation of claims established more than forty years ago if they are re-recorded but does not require easements to be re-recorded if they are visible or evidenced by a "recorded agreement." In Gray v. Treder, 2018 VT 137, 2018 Vt. LEXIS 237 (Vt. 2018), the...
In White v. Auger,2019 N.H. LEXIS 4 (N.H. 2019), the grantor conveyed property to a grantee "on condition that" the grantee build on it (or on adjacent land) and live there (within 10 years) created a fee simple subject to executory limitation. State statutes abolished possibilities of reverter, rights of entry, and...
In Save America's Clocks, Inc. v. City of New York, 2019 WL 1385906 (N.Y. 2019), the New York Court of Appeals overturned lower court rulings that invalidated a decision of the local historic landmarks commission to allow changes to a clock that had been designated a historic landmark both as part of an historic buliding and in its own right. The buyer of the building proposed to privatize the room on the...
Construing a state statute, the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia held that a shooting range cannot constitute a nuisance if it complies with local noise ordinances. However, that statute could not be applied retroactively without violating vested property rights so the plaintiffs in the case were entitled to damages but...
Persons in need of financial assistance to afford housing are in a variety of categories of persons protected by the Fair Housing Act. African Americans are more likely than white persons to be poor; women of all races are more likely to be poor than men; persons with disabilities are more likely to need government assistance than...
In accord with both the traditional and the modern approach to conflict of laws, a federal court held that the law of the place where the property is situated (and where the harm is felt) applies even when the conduct took place in another state. ...
As happened in the Supreme Court cases of Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. 103 (2006) and United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), the Sixth Circuit has used property law concepts to interpret the Fourth Amendment while misunderstanding what the property laws in force. US v. Jones held that the fourth amendment was violated when...