ABSTRACT
When we first approached property law with a view to incorporating crosscultural issues, we encountered a paradox. On the one hand, any system of property rights in land goes to the heart of questions of wealth and entitlement, the very stuff of social justice that concerns us in developing cross-cultural perspectives on the law curriculum. On the other, property law as taught in many law schools seems so burdened with archaic maxims and quasi-mathematical formulae (entails, fee simples, nemo dat, ad nauseam) that it appears unusually resilient in resisting the type of approaches we were championing. It has a reputation as being both mystifying and boring, precisely because it doesn’t seem to have any relevance to real life.1
