Yale professor to talk about racially restrictive covenants

March 11, 2013

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — While the idea sounds absurd today, up until the 1940s it was not uncommon for property deeds to include clauses that restricted the sale of property to whites only. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled against these racially restrictive covenants and the practice was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act.

Carol M. Rose, a Yale and Arizona law professor, will discuss, “Property Law and the Rise, Life, and Demise of Racially Restrictive Covenants,” at the sixth annual Wolf Family Lecture on the American Law of Real Property at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. The lecture will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday in the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center courtroom. The event is free and open to the public.

The Wolf Family Lecture will offer valuable insights for property law students, as well as those interested in constitutional law and students involved with the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations.

Rose is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law, and Organization and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, and the Lohse Chair in Water and Natural Resources at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Her book, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (Harvard University Press), which she co-authored with Yale Law Professor Richard Brooks, will be available March 11.

The Wolf Family Lecture Series was endowed by a gift from UF Law Professor Michael Allan Wolf, who holds the Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law, and his wife, Betty. Wolf is the general editor of a 17-volume treatise, Powell on Real Property. The treatise is the most referenced real property treatise in the country and is cited regularly by the courts, including several citations in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Wolf family’s strong ties to the University of Florida date to the 1930s, when Wolf’s father, Leonard Wolf, was a UF undergraduate. Since that time, two more generations of his descendants have made their way to Gainesville to study and work.