Property Law
- Remote Witnesses and WillsThe COVID-19 pandemic has caused a surge in the number of Americans using online services to make wills. If people are subject to shelter-in-place orders, however, the witnessing condition required by statutory law is not readily satisfied—the testator and two witnesses cannot occupy the same physical place at the same time. While some states have temporarily allowed remote witnessing, such relief has not been uniformly implemented across the country. Thus, an instrument prepared online may fail to fulfill a decedent’s…
- HOAs and Residents with COVID-19The coronavirus quarantine has led many states to issue stay-at-home orders on the plausible theory that doing so will cause individuals to be isolated from others and less likely to catch or spread the virus. Yet for many people, “home” is not a place of complete isolation, but involves shared space where residents come into repeated contact with each other in order to wash clothes, step outside, or pick up an Instacart order. Condominium complexes, for example, entail sole ownership…
- Closed for Business – Open for Litigation?Can a business-closure regulation of commercial property in a pandemic be a taking? In the midst of a pandemic, it generally falls to government to enact laws and regulations in an effort to curtail the spread of disease. For example, the Supreme Court discusses compulsory vaccination in Jacobson v. Massachusetts and quarantines in Smith v. Turner. In a liberty-oriented constitutional federalist democratic republic like America, this can be challenging–indeed, the volume of published opinions in this area of law show…