Book Excerpt: Heirs' Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (Thomas W. Mitchell & Erica Levine Powers eds., 2022)

Abstract

This article is an excerpt of a book chapter of mine from a 2022 A.B.A. book titled Heirs' Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: Challenges, Solutions, and Historic Reform, a book for which I served as the lead co-editor. The excerpt demonstrates that so-called heirs' property is a type of family real property ownership that is much more prevalent in the United States than most academics, policymakers, and other stakeholders once believed. Black and brown families disproportionately though not exclusively own heirs' property due, in part, to little known massive racial and ethnic will-making and estate planning gaps in this country, gaps the article brings to light. The excerpt highlights how judicial application of an arcane property law known as partition law has resulted in thousands of heirs' property owners being subject to ruinous, court-ordered forced sales that extinguished their property rights and wiped out much of their generational wealth. The excerpt then provides an overview of several key features of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), an incredibly successful uniform real property act, for which I served as the reporter (principal drafter). The UPHPA makes the most substantial reforms to state partition laws since a major reform many states made to partition law in the 1800s. The UPHPA has been enacted into law in almost half of the states in the country, states that have two-thirds of the U.S. population, making it one of the most successful uniform acts the Uniform Law Commission has promulgated over the course of the past thirty years.

JEL Classification: D63, I39, K11, Q15, R39, E52