Heirs Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: Challenges, Solutions, and Historic Reform

In recent times there has been growing awareness about various heirs’ property problems, including massive, decades-long, involuntary land loss. Heirs’ Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: Challenges, Solutions, and Historic Reform should increase that awareness among lawyers, the general public, and policymakers. Just as importantly, the book offers many practical solutions for those seeking to address a variety of heirs’ property problems. The contributing authors possess deep expertise in working on a range of heirs’ property issues, including Thomas Mitchell, the lead co-editor and contributing author, who was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant in large part for his heirs’ property work. These authors include academics, leaders of various nonprofit organizations that do important heirs’ property work, grassroot activists, and prominent attorneys in private practice. Includes: Discussion and analysis of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which represents historic reform of partition law, the source of massive property loss that has robbed disadvantaged urban and rural families of billions of dollars of generational wealth. Proposals for changing state laws that deprive heirs’ property owners of important tax benefits. Detailed guidance on how families and their attorneys can use proactive planning to either avoid or resolve various heirs’ property issues. Discussions of how some community-based and community development organizations have not only been helping many families retain their heirs’ property, but also have been helping them to use their property in more valuable and sustainable ways, including to build wealth.

Thomas W. Mitchell is a full professor (Professor) at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He has done extensive research and legislative and outreach work on property issues within poor and/or minority communities, both domestically and internationally. He is a national expert on the issue of black landownership in the United States. He served on the Property Preservation Task Force, a task force of the A.B.A.'s Section of Real Property, Trust and Estate Law, which successfully petitioned the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (commonly known as the Uniform Law Commission) to develop a uniform law to address the prevalence of forced sales of family property owned under the tenancy in common form of ownership (a form of ownership commonly referred to as heirs' property). Professor Mitchell then served as the Reporter, person tasked with primary drafting responsibility, for the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act which was promulgated by the Uniform Law Commission in 2010 and endorsed by the A.B.A. in 2011. He has received national attention for his outreach work and was one of two law professors in the United States selected in 2013 for the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award, which is awarded to professors in the fields of law, medicine, and psychology who have done substantial work in mentoring their students who then as graduates have made major contributions to helping disadvantaged communities. Prior to entering legal academia, he worked as an associate at the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. and served as a law clerk for Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District Court of the D.C. Circuit.  He is a graduate of Amherst College (B.A.); the Howard University School of Law (J.D.); and the University of Wisconsin Law School (LL.M. upon completion of the William H. Hastie Fellowship Program).

Erica Levine Powers is a mediator and transactional /regulatory land use lawyer in in Albany, New York,

who in 2019 served as senior zoning and land use attorney in the City of Atlanta Law Department. She is admitted in Massachusetts, Maryland and New York. In 2021-22 she was Chair of the ABA Section of State & Local Government Law.

A cum laude graduate of Harvard in Modern European History and Literature, she holds J.D. and LL.M. (Taxation) degrees from Boston University School of Law. Initially counsel to the Massachusetts Commissioner of Banks and then a corporate transactional lawyer at Gaston Snow & Ely Bartlett, Boston, she served as counsel to the Deputy Mayor/ Collector Treasurer of the City of Boston and as General Counsel to the Massachusetts Department of Food & Agriculture. She has been a visiting professor of planning (sabbatical coverage) at Cornell University, Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and Massey University in New Zealand. She has joined the faculty of Albany Law School as an adjunct, teaching Alternative Dispute Resolution in Spring 2023.

Erica is an affiliated scholar in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University at Albany (SUNY), where she served as an adjunct faculty member in land use and environmental planning from spring 2009 through spring 2013 and developed a graduate seminar on hydraulic fracturing. She is the lead editor and a contributing author of Beyond the Fracking Wars (ABA, 2013), acclaimed for its scope and objectivity. She and MacArthur Fellow Thomas W. Mitchell are co-editors of Heirs' Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: Challenges, Solutions, and Historic Reform (ABA 2022), an act currently adopted in twenty-one jurisdictions, on a topic where mediation plays an important role.

Erica's background in law, public administration, and non-profit organizations enhances her ADR experience. She is respectful of varying points of view. She has excellent interpersonal skills: outstanding listening skills; empathy; common sense; and highly effective oral and written communication. Unusually for a lawyer, she reasons inductively. A problem-solver, she can help parties focus on areas in which they can structure their own agreement. She has an excellent sense of humor, and is comfortable serving as a neutral, including in highly-charged emotional situations.

Her training in dispute resolution in New York includes mediation training through the Dispute Resolution Section of the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA): Commercial Mediation (2011); Advanced Commercial Mediation (2020); Advanced Personal Injury Mediation (2021); and Comprehensive Commercial Arbitration training for arbitrators and counsel (2022), as recipient of a Dispute Resolution Section Diversity Scholarship; and through the New York County Lawyers Association Joint Committee on Fee Dispute & Conciliation: Part 137 Attorney-Client Fee Dispute Resolution Arbitration training.

Erica currently is a mediator in the New York City Civil Small Claims Court and an applicant for a range of panels that reflect her ADR training, including divorce mediation training in Massachusetts twenty years ago. She recently served as a facilitator for Simeon Baum: Advanced Commercial Mediation Training for Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation, on September 23, 2022.  On October 20, 2022 she co-moderated a roundtable discussion: "Timing of Mediation: Conduct it Sooner or Later?" at the Fall Meeting of the NYSBA Dispute Resolution Section.

Erica organized and moderated a NYSBA DR Section roundtable on December 7, 2022: "Using Alternative Dispute Resolution to Address Racial, Ethnic and Socio-Economic Disparities in Heirs' Property Ownership." The program was live in NYC and virtual, with a national audience and national speakers, co-sponsored by numerous entities including four sections of the American Bar Association, and co-introduced by NYSBA President Sherry Levin Wallach and ABA President Deborah Enix-Ross.

Erica is an Advisory Board member/ Council representative of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section (2020-present); the elected Secretary of the NYSBA Dispute Resolution Section for the 2023-24 fiscal year; a co-chair of the NYSBA Dispute Resolution Section's Legislation Committee (2022-present), a member of its Mediation Committee and a co-manager of its Mediation Mentorship Program (2021-present), a member of its Diversity and Inclusion Committee, its Ethics Committee, and its Outreach Task Force, and a member of the planning committees for the Dispute Resolution Section's Fall Meeting and 2023 Annual Meeting; and a member of the New York County Lawyers Association (2020-2022) and Albany County Bar Association (2022-present).