Brigham-Kanner Conference

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William and Mary Law School’s Property Rights Project has announced that Professor James E. Penner (Kwa Geok Choo Professor of Property Law at the National University of Singapore) will be awarded the 2026 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize.

This is in keeping with the international theme in the 2026 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference, which will be in London, October 15-16, 2026.

It isn’t too early to make your plans and save the date on your calendars.

More on Professor Penner and the Prize here.

Plan on joining us in London later this year!

Continue Reading 2026 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize To Professor James Penner

This past week we were busy with the 22d Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference at the William and Mary Law School.

Here’s the text of the remarks which I prepared for the session on “Public Safety, Private Property, and Just Compensation.” Note: because of time, I truncated what I planned on saying and kept it shorter.

* * * *

Public Safety, Private Property, and Just Compensation

Before I begin, a prelude. As you learned earlier, yesterday the student Real Estate Law Society produced a reargument of Kelo.

Ms. Kelo won this time. Six-to-zero, adopting the rationale of Justice Thomas’s dissent in the original case, with one concurring opinion. (More about this event in a separate post.)

And for those of you in the audience who didn’t know, Ms. Kelo’s famous little pink house was saved, even though her property was not. The house was taken apart board-by-board…

Continue Reading Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex: 2025 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference Report

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That’s right, it’s time to plan on joining us at the 22d edition of the best one-day property law conference, William and Mary Law School‘s Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference.

As we noted, Professor William Fischel will be awarded the 2025 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize at the annual Wren Building candlelight ceremony in Williamsburg on October 23, with the following day being devoted to a celebration of his work and career, and discussions of the hot topics in property rights law.

The Conference is expressly designed to get legal academics and the nation’s best dirt law practitioners in the same room, discussion how legal scholarship and law practice work hand-in-hand to shape the law. 

More details:  

The Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize is presented annually to a scholar, practitioner, or jurist whose work affirms the fundamental importance of property rights. It is named in honor of the late Toby Prince…

Continue Reading Registration Open: 22d Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference, Oct. 23-24, 2025, Williamsburg

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Here’s news we’ve been waiting for.

The William and Mary Law School announced that Professor William Fischel will be awarded the 2025 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize at the annual conference in Williamsburg in October 2025. 

The Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize is presented annually to a scholar, practitioner, or jurist whose work affirms the fundamental importance of property rights. It is named in honor of the late Toby Prince Brigham, a leading property rights attorney, and the late Gideon Kanner, a devoted scholar of property rights who was Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Professor Fischel taught in the Economics Department at Dartmouth from 1973 until his retirement in 2019. His scholarship focuses on the law and economics of local government, and his expertise includes local government law, school finance, zoning and land use controls, property taxation, and regulatory takings law. He is the author of five…

Continue Reading And The 2025 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize Goes To…Professor William Fischel

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Screenshot 2024-12-23 at 08-18-04 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Journal Volume 13 by William & Mary Law School

The latest edition of the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Journal (William & Mary Law School) is out, with intriguing Dirt Law scholarship from the luminaries in the field.

Check out the Table of Contents above, and then go here to download each piece or the entire issue. We will note, with a small bit of pride, that two of the pieces were authored or co-authored by former students of ours (at W&M Law and the University of Hawaii Law School).

All of the pieces are must-reads.Continue Reading Volume 13 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Journal Now Available

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How it started.

Once again, our fall duties included teaching two property law courses at the William and Mary Law School: Eminent Domain & Property Rights, and Land Use Controls. We started in mid-August, and just wrapped the classroom portion of the courses earlier this week. I say “classroom portions” because although we are done with classwork, the courses are not done, and the students are presently deep into writing their final papers (we don’t do an exam in either course). Then comes grading, and a welcoming of the students as full-fledged colleagues in the Dirt Law Bar.

Many law schools feature Land Use Law courses, but only a few are so bold as to include a course on Eminent Domain and Property Rights in their offerings (and a substantial three-credit course, at that). William and Mary Law School is an excellent and very appropriate place to study these topics.…

Continue Reading Another Semester Of Dirt Law In The Books

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Here’s the full report from David Morrill about the 21st Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference earlier this month. Pictured above: Professor James Stern (responsible for the overall planning of the B-K Conference), this year’s Prizewinner Professor Lee Fennell (U. Chicago Law School), and Andrew Brigham, St. Augustine, Florida – property rights lawyer extraordinaire).

Here are what Prof. Fennell had to say:

Upon accepting the Property Rights Prize, Fennell said that spending time in myriad places through the years piqued her interest in how property can work better for complex systems like large and interconnected cities and ecosystems. In the process, she tried to learn more about what sorts of interconnectedness matter most for humans and other animals, and what forms of adaptability and property forms can best serve needs going forward.

“We can’t make any headway on property as an institutional response to interdependent systems without practicing interdependence ourselves, getting together…

Continue Reading 21st Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference Report

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The 21st Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference is underway at the William and Mary Law School. We have a series of student-oriented programs (co-sponsored by the Office of Careers Service),

Tomorrow, lawprof Lee Anne Fennell of the University of Chicago Law School will be presented the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize for her work on “how property rights are structured and imagined, and the implications that different possibilities hold for the allocation of resources and the way societies are organized. She has cast these issues in terms like ‘slices’ versus ‘lumps,’ ‘unbounded’ homes, ‘half-torts,’ and ‘streaming property.'”

On Friday, there’s a series of presentations on the impact of Professor’s Fennell’s work and other hot topics in dirt law. Full agenda here or below.

We are fortunate enough to be the referee — uh, “moderator” — for the group discussing what we see as the hottest issue in the field: housing. The …

Continue Reading 21st Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference Now Underway

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Yes, the mysterious ducks remain — and seem to have multiplied.

It’s that time of the year again. Fall’s-a-coming, and that means that starting today, we’re back at the William and Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia to lead two courses:

  • Eminent Domain and Property Rights (W&M is one of the few law schools in the country that offer a course in eminent domain, just compensation, and takings)
  • Land Use Controls (an especially hot topic at the moment)

The registration numbers for both courses are good (really good), and two full classrooms of Dirt Law goodness tells us something about this area of law — it’s really interesting, and a good place to make your way in the practice, and law students recognize that.

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We don’t use $400 casebooks in either class.

Time to jack back into the (takings and land use) Matrix.

6a00d83451707369e20240a476d216200c-800wiContinue Reading Back To School For Dirt Law @ William & Mary, Season VII