Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes and Race

Property law’s roots are rural. America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded physical place in it. But we have drifted far from this ideal. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, rural decline. The fee simple ownership form has failed every objective but one: the maintenance white landownership. For it was also embedded original experiment land would be racialized benefit its citizens, through acts colonialism, slavery, explicit race-based exclusion law. rather than undoing legacy, modern rules only further concentrate homogenize Agricultural landownership remains almost entirely— 98 percent—white. This critical racial justice issue converges directly with our impending environmental crisis decline more generally. Article builds on work sociologists farm advocates demonstrate, again again, despite pervasive narrative places dying want population agricultural systems too gone reform, reality crowd emerging farmers—and farmers color particular— clamoring access. Existing policy efforts support beginning focused primarily supporting few private transactions within existing systems. brings theory table first time, arguing law itself not responsible distributions actively perpetuates both ongoing disparities currently industrialized depopulated landscape. deconstructs most fundamental land-tenure choice—the itself—and calls collective legal imagination develop adaptive, inclusive, dynamic designs rooted these otherwise overlooked places.