LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Written by Norm Chernin Editor-in-Chief

EVOLVING REAL PROPERTY LAW

I have been practicing law for more than fifty years. For almost all that time, my focus has been on real property law. Recently I have been musing about how things that I thought were immutable have been altered.

As we all learned in law school, there is a good deal of formality associated with interests in real property, especially with aspects of holding title to real property. The integrity of our system of landholding would seem to require adherence to recognizable rules that apply to owning, transferring, and encumbering of real property. However, just like constitutional law which is based on a single document drafted at a particular time in history, adjustments are necessary to deal with changes in circumstances that could not have been envisioned by the original drafters of the Constitution or by the creators of the rules affecting real property.