Beginning in 1981 and continuing into the mid-1990s, The Alledger was the student newspaper of the Boston College Law School. The Alledger published both serious and satirical articles on topics related to student life at the law school. Frequent topics include the arrival and departure of faculty members, profiles of candidates for leadership positions in student government, and previews of lectures given by noteworthy speakers.

The publication consistently poked fun at the law student experience, making professors and classmates alike the targets of good-natured parody. The Alledger featured an annual April Fool’s Day issue which consisted entirely of satirical articles.

The Alledger is a record of the school’s history, offering evidence of an increasingly competitive environment for law schools in the form of extensive coverage of a 1995 dispute related to the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings. The newspaper also recorded changes in the demographics of the student body, as well as frequent discussion of tuition increases and the financial relationship of the law school to the university. Moreover, the humorous and frank tone of The Alledger provides real insight into the lives of law students in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Alledger was digitized from the collection of the Boston College Law School Library. Issues missing from this collection are not owned by the law library; due to frequent inconsistencies in the numbering of issues, the law library is not sure how many issues are missing from this collection.

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review is Boston College Law School's flagship scholarly publication.

The Review, ranked in the top 25 law journals by Washington & Lee, publishes eight issues each year featuring articles and essays by prominent authors addressing legal issues of national interest.

In addition to articles written by outside academics, the Review prints the work of its student staff, many of whom publish notes during their third year. The Review’s second-year staff members also prepare short comments on recent federal circuit court decisions, which may be published in the Review's Electronic Supplement.

Visit the Boston College Law Review website at <a href="http://bclawreview.bc.edu">bclawreview.bc.edu</a>.


Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law Library collects the publications of Law School faculty, and, when possible, makes them available through this collection. Organized by year and tagged with authors and subject areas, this resource reflects the school and the library’s commitment to open access while at the same time serving as a valuable institutional record.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

For well over 125 years, many Americans have lost their tenancy-in-common property involuntarily in various legal proceedings. For example, courts throughout this country have often resolved partition actions, a legal proceeding in which a tenant in common seeks to exit a tenancy in common, by ordering a forced, partition sale of the property even when these courts could have ordered a remedy that would have preserved the property rights of the tenants in common. Though partition sales have negatively impacted a broad cross section of people in this country, the sales have particularly impacted poor and disadvantaged African-Americans, Hispanics, white Americans, and in some instances, Native Americans. The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), a project that the American Bar Association's Section of Real Property, Trust, and Estate Law helped convince the Uniform Law Commission to undertake in 2007, seeks to address partition action abuses that have led to significant property loss. Thomas W. Mitchell, the Reporter for the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, explains the UPHPA and the history of its enactment by states over the last five years.

 Restoring Hope for Heirs Property Owners: The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act

Landownership and homeownership are significant contributors to the creation of wealth and thus, drivers of intergenerational economic mobility. However, many people who have inherited family land are unable to realize these opportunities because of the legal effect of their particular form of landownership, often called heirs' property. These landowners are more likely to lose their land through what is known as a partition sale—a property sale resulting from a dispute between co-owners, often ignited by an outside party with an investment interest in the land. This Partners Update article explores the repercussions of heirs' property ownership and examines legislative solutions recently enacted in three southeastern states: Florida, Mississippi, and Virginia.

 Expansion of New Law in Southeast May Stave Off Black Land Loss

May 1992 letter from three Howard University School of Law students to President George H.W. Bush advocating that the United States Department of Justice invoke the Petite Policy to initiate a criminal action against the Los Angeles Police Department police officers responsible for brutally beating Rodney King despite the fact that these offers had been acquitted in a California state court. The letter, which was read in front of the White House by Thomas Mitchell to hundreds of people who had gathered to urge the federal government to take action, sets forth a clear legal basis to permit the Justice Department to prosecute those responsible for the trampling of Rodney King's civil rights.

 Justice for Rodney King

This article deconstructs the role that race played in the land crisis in Zimbabwe that occurred in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s and earls 2000s. The article makes it clear that the government of Zimbabwe did not extend robust property rights to its black majority population for the most part even as it took land from large white landowners. This is revealing given that the government's primary justification for taking land from large white landowners was that the black majority unjustly owned little property in Zimbabwe as a result of colonialist and neocolonialist, discriminatory polices.

 The Land Crisis in Zimbabwe: Getting Beyond the Myopic Focus Upon Black & White

This article considers one of the primary ways in which African Americans have lost millions of acres of land that they were able to acquire in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning part of the twentieth century and the sociopolitical implications of this land loss. Specifically, this article highlights the fact that forced partition sales of tenancy in common property, referred to more commonly as heirs' property, have been a major source of black land loss within the African American community. The article argues that involuntary black land loss has had a significant negative impact upon the African American community given that the acquisition of land represented more than simply the acquisition of an important economic asset for African Americans who had been denied the opportunity for the most part to become real property owners prior to the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction. Consistent with political and property theory, after Reconstruction, many African Americans believed that landownership would enable them to participate much more robustly in the political life of the country and in civil society and that such ownership would provide African Americans with a foundation for the establishment of healthy and stable communities. In contrast to the default rules governing exit from tenancy in common ownership, the article demonstrates that the law often enables certain groups or communities to own property under various common ownership structures in a way that supports the ability of these groups and communities to maintain stable ownership of their real property over time. Given that poor and minority communities have lost a great deal of land that they had valued for both important economic and non-economic reasons, this article advocates for several reform proposals. These proposed reforms include proposed modifications to the default rules governing tenancy in common property that would enable groups such as African Americans who own much of their land under these default rules to maintain ownership of their property in a significantly more stable way than they do today.

From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common

Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it has proceeded in an empirical vacuum. The article proceeds to examine existing data, and to describe the ongoing empirical research being conducted on black rural land loss in the U.S. south by Mitchell and his team. Mitchell concludes that a thoroughly contextual analysis (combining qualitative with quantitative methods) is necessary if we are to achieve an accurate understanding of the process by which law contributes to black rural land loss in this country. This kind of understanding will permit more effective policy decisions, both within and outside of the law.

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The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

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Restoring Hope for Heirs Property Owners: The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act

Expansion of New Law in Southeast May Stave Off Black Land Loss

Justice for Rodney King

The Land Crisis in Zimbabwe: Getting Beyond the Myopic Focus Upon Black & White

From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community through Partition Sales of Tenancies in ...

Destabilizing the Normalization of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role for Legal Empiricism

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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The Alledger