Abstract
Excerpted From: Elizabeth M. Bloom, Natasha N. Varyani, Owning Our Values: Understanding Systemic Racism Through the Lens of Property Law (And Skills to Do Something about It), Durham, Nc: Carolina Academic Press, 2024, Pp. 274, $40 (Paperback), 73 Journal of Legal Education 886 (Spring, 2025) (34 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Owning Our Values: Understanding Systemic Racism Through the Lens of Property Law (And Skills to Do Something About It) is an essential resource for the growing number of legal educators and law students who recognize that examining systemic inequities created and reinforced by the legal system is not only a critical component of legal education, but perhaps the most critical component. Acknowledging that Property is a challenging course because it addresses a series of discrete topics without the clear unifying theme of rules or elements that tie most first-year doctrinal courses together, Professor Varyani uses systemic racism as a basis for sorting and organizing the different subjects covered in the course. Throughout the book, she makes critical connections between property doctrine and the systems and structures that have created and perpetuated racism in the United States.
The book's structure is straightforward and extremely user friendly, making it an ideal supplement (in part or whole) to any Property casebook. Each chapter is divided into two parts. The first part helps students understand the doctrine in historical context by providing a variety of pedagogical tools such as visual organizers, timelines, charts, and thought process diagrams to help students actively engage with the content they are learning to conceptualize the law. The second part scaffolds student learning by providing practice opportunities to engage in legal analysis. The skills development progresses throughout the book, starting with the most basic task of case briefing and ultimately building to the broad range of foundational lawyering skills that will be tested on the Next Gen Bar Exam -- those that account for the role lawyers will play as the legal profession enters the generative artificial intelligence era.
Ultimately, the book helps students successfully build three critical competencies: (1) understanding Property law doctrine; (2) developing self-regulation skills through concrete skill-building exercises that draw upon educational psychology principles guiding best practices of formative assessment; and (3) preparing to be culturally responsive lawyers with the skills to challenge systemic racism. While any of these three topics alone would be useful to a student learning property law, it's the unique combination that makes this book so remarkable and especially judicious given American Bar Association accreditation standards requiring law schools to teach professional identity formation and bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.
Professor Varyani's tone is accessible and inviting from the outset of the book. In her Land and Labor Acknowledgement, Disclosure and Warning to the Reader, and Preface, she demonstrates the vulnerability and innovative pedagogical approaches that ground her writing. She shares the ways her South Asian American identity has shaped her views of her own legal education and experiences as a legal practitioner and professor teaching property doctrine, skills, and critical race theory. She intersperses these components of her identity throughout the book, modeling for us that we should not leave our lived experiences or shared humanity at the law school classroom door and giving life to her two recurring and related mantras, “words matter” and ““relationships are everything.” As the book builds, Professor Varyani further reveals the intricacies of her complex Indian and Pakistani identity, sharing gratitude for the communities she is part of and connecting that sentiment to the property rights she holds most dear: “the ability to choose where to live and to come and go as one pleases -- that is the right in property that is worth protecting.”
Acknowledging how uncomfortable it can be to engage in classroom conversations about race and identity (“the material contained herein is not for the faint of heart” Professor Varyani emphasizes that professors must not shy away from facilitating these challenging conversations. She shares many tips and techniques for co-creating a collaborative and courageous classroom space that centers empathy and grace (her north stars in the classroom) and is informed by the complete story of our nation's history. She encourages professors to share both the privileged and marginalized aspects of their identities to help connect with their students, many of who struggle to reconcile their own complicated identities with the law they are learning. Her passion and commitment to changing the way we navigate these critical conversations is a powerful call to action: setting the tone and modeling the genuine efforts required to engage in vulnerable conversations about race and identity helps students develop the skills that they will use as lawyers to help change our collective discourse and dynamics.
To that end, she provides concrete suggestions for making pedagogical choices that center humanity and avoid stigmatization of certain populations. (A representative property example in the context of nuisance is using the phrase “people who are unhoused” instead of “the homeless.”) She shares a prompt for engaging in classroom collaboration when choosing what language will be used to refer to racial groups, pointing out that older cases often use racial language that is now considered hate speech. She provides reassurances that there is no one perfect way to approach these conversations and that it is hard to keep up with constantly changing norms. To that end, Professor Varyani discusses adopting and modeling a growth mindset to help build confidence through the challenging and often frustrating experiences of the 1L year. Many of these pedagogical strategies serve the additional purpose of modeling principles of antiracist lawyering students may use with their future clients.
Professor Varyani begins each chapter with a powerful framing epigraph to contextualize the content that follows. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading that build on the various stories and examples provided in the text. For example, after describing the experiences of Professor Patricia Williams being refused entry to a buzzer store on the basis of her race, Professor Varyani suggests readers take in Professor Williams' Spirit Murdering the Messenger: The Discourse of Fingerpointing as the Law's Response to Racism to learn more about the psychological impact of exclusion by race. And in a chapter devoted in large part to the institution of slavery and its dehumanization of Black Americans, she recommends Ta-Nehisi Coates' groundbreaking work, The Case for Reparations. By including a wide range of sources such as newspaper articles, podcasts, non-legal books, and even a movie, readers are able to explore the sources that resonate most with them to help contextualize the subject matter. Providing choice has the added benefit of encouraging students to take ownership of their learning, an essential step in developing self-regulation skills.
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Professor Varyani's work will have a profound impact on future lawyers' ability to use the law as a tool to pursue justice. While this book will, of course, help law professors teach and law students learn the basics of Property law, the brilliance of her work is in her simple but mighty innovation: buttressing the basic learning of the law with the much deeper -- and educationally richer -notion that you need to truly understand how laws impact people to be an effective attorney, thus returning to one of Professor Varyani's two grounding mantras, “relationships are everything.”
In the final analysis, this book more than accomplishes its many important goals across multiple dimensions. It gives law professors some much-needed fresh thinking about how they approach their teaching. It helps break down complicated components of Property law. It will prepare students to become critical thinkers and hone the skills required for the NextGen Bar Exam. And it will, without a doubt, help students become culturally responsive attorneys, who are well-positioned to challenge the racial disparities and systemic inequities created and perpetuated by the legal system.
Elizabeth M. Bloom is a Teaching Professor at Northeastern University School of Law.
