He is just the second African-American to have served as a reporter for the Uniform Law Commission in its 120-year history. Thomas Mitchell, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, presented his talk “Uniform/Model Laws and Social Justice” at Texas Wesleyan School of Law on Feb. 20, 2013, as part of the “Faculty Speaker Series.”
Mitchell has done extensive research and legislative and outreach work on property issues impacting poor and minority communities. He served as the reporter for the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act which was promulgated by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, also known as the Uniform Law Commission, in 2010. The Act is designed to make family property ownership more secure and has been enacted into law in Georgia and Nevada. In 2011, the American Bar Association approved the Act as appropriate legislation for states to consider enacting into law.
“The Uniform Law process is an amazing resource, but it is underutilized by public interest and civil rights lawyers,” Mitchell said. “Ours was not the typical ULC project in that it addressed problems of low- to moderate-income property owners.” Professor Mitchell hopes that their efforts will lead to replication of other such projects by the ULC.
The UPHPA seeks to correct problems many families who own tenancy-in-common property have experienced in maintaining their property-based wealth when one or more co-owners file a lawsuit to exit the common ownership arrangement through a partition action. Many of the families facing such lawsuits are African-Americans.
“How do many current state laws create their intended goal of wealth maximization through the partition process?” Mitchell asked. “They don’t,” he said, answering his own question. “Court-ordered sales are often at 50 percent or less of the property’s market value.” Not only do court-ordered partition sales undermine property rights for many low- to moderate-income property owners, but many, if not most, partition sales end up stripping property owners of most of their real property-related wealth.
“The UPHPA established a hierarchy of remedies which are designed to both strengthen the property rights of property owners most at risk of losing their property at forced partition sales and to improve significantly the ability of these property owners to maintain their real-estate based wealth, should a court order a forced partition sale,” Mitchell said.
The Act is one of the few purely domestic uniform acts which the Uniform Law Commission has promulgated that draws in some important ways upon private law from other countries.