The Center for Real Estate Law is committed to development of new course materials— transactional texts and legal case studies—to teach law students substantive real estate law in the context of a transaction, rather than from appellate court decisions. Development of new materials supports the goal of the ABA MacCrate Report, which urged legal educators to help “bridge the gap” between law school and practice. A handful of real estate law professors, including John Marshall Professors Celeste Hammond and Debra Stark, have already developed new texts where appellate court opinions are replaced or supplemented by fact patterns that simulate real-life deals and documents used in practice. These texts use “transactional” or “transaction-based” in their titles to distinguish them from traditional casebooks.
Professor Stark has authored Commercial Real Estate Transactions: A Project and Skills Oriented Approach (with Cameron, Durham, and White; Lexis 2001), and Residential Real Estate Law—A Transactional Skills Analysis (Carolina Academic Press 2004). Professor Hammond has authored Commercial Leasing: A Transactional Primer (with Bogart; Carolina Academic Press 2007), and Modern Real Estate Finance and Land Transfer—A Transactional Approach (with Bender, Madison, and Zinman; 4th ed. 2008). These texts are used nationally in American law schools to help students learn about the substantive law and practice in this important field.
Recently, and partly in response to the Carnegie Foundation Report on Legal Education, the Center has begun to experiment with offering real estate courses that rely upon the case method originated and developed by the Harvard Business School. Few examples exist for those seeking to follow this business school model to utilize legal case studies in law classes.
Like the business school prototype, a legal case study focused on real estate would be based upon the actual facts of a complex commercial real estate transaction wherein the perspectives of all the players would be developed as the attorneys solve ambiguous problems of real-life proportions. It is in this context that the Center launched its Legal Case Study Project. The Center is now pleased to announce that Professor Hammond is preparing the Center’s first legal case study, with the cooperation of co-authors Steven Good and Dr. Margot Weinstein.
Building from an example related by Good in Chapter 8, “Un-United Homes,” in his book Churches Jails and Goldmines…Mega-Deals from a Real Estate Maverick (Dearborn Trade Publishing 2003), Professor Hammond has prepared “Private Auctions of Commercial Real Estate as a Way to Protect Creditors in Bankruptcy and Quickly Recycle Properties to Productive Use: The United Homes Portfolio: A Legal Case Study.” The authors, Professor Hammond, Good, and Weinstein, also make extensive use of a business case study on the same fact pattern prepared by Good and Weinstein, “Auctioning the United Homes Portfolio: A Case Study,” that they presented at the April 2006 meeting of the American Real Estate Society (ARES). In preparing this case study, Professor Hammond was able to review the deal documents and court files as well as interview participants, thanks to the cooperation of Richard Lauter of Freeborn & Peters, Barry Chatz of Arnstein & Lehr, and Ronald Barliant of Goldberg Kohn.
When published, “United Homes Portfolio: A Legal Case Study” will enable students to consider and evaluate the use of a bankruptcy court-approved real estate auction, which has been one way to deal with real estate in troubled times.