Land Transfers: Process and Processors

The buying and selling of land is a complex process that normally involves a series of procedures and the assistance of service specialists skilled in implementing these procedures. This article, that in substance comprised the Seegers lectures for 1988, considers the land transfer process by focusing on the principal service specialists who operate the process and who in large measure are responsible for how well it functions. The principal service specialists in the land transfer field are real estate brokers, lawyers, title companies, and lenders. As is true of many social processes, the transfer of land interests cannot be fully understood without an understanding of the service specialists who make the process work. Service specialists carry out the process, are crucial to how it is shaped, and are the focus of legal controls over the process. Structural and operational changes in service specialists, whether the result of market forces or government regulation, can have major consequences for those the process is designed to serve—mostly buyers and sellers of land in the case of land transfers. Changes in land transfer servicers can also have repercussions on the entire economy due to the massive size of the American land market and its extension into every local community

Models for Curricular Reform

The basic purposes of legal education should be the major factors controlling the nature of law school curriculums. These purposes, however, can be inconsistent and they commonly lead to competition for curricular time and attention. More thought is needed on what purposes are worth pushing, how each purpose should be implemented and how conflicts among purposes should be resolved. But this whole process of evaluating and projecting purposes in legal education appears to have gone stale, despite considerable teacher discontent with what is being taught and how. An approach seems called for that will shake-up established patterns of looking at law schools, one that is uninhibited by the presence of well-rooted institutions and customs. What follows is a set of four models outlining four very different kinds of law schools, no one of which closely resembles any institution now in being. The discussion of each model is accompanied by some of the possible rationales supportive of the type law school described. It is not here proposed that any model merits adoption or that anyone is better than the others. Nor are any of the rationales here endorsed as valid. What this presentation is intended to do is illustrate an approach that may prove helpful in rethinking the curriculum