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

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.

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

What impact does a forced sale have upon a property owner's wealth? And do certain characteristics of a property owner such as whether they are rich or poor or whether they are black or white, tend to affect the price yielded at a forced sale? This Article addresses arguments made by some courts and legal scholars who have claimed that certain types of forced sales result in wealth maximizing, economic efficiencies. The Article addresses such economic arguments by returning to first principles and reviewing the distinction between sales conducted under fair market value conditions and sales conducted under forced sale conditions. This analysis makes it clear that forced sales of real or personal property are conducted under conditions that are rarely likely to yield market value prices. In addition, the Article addresses the fact that judges and legal scholars have utilized a flawed economic analysis of forced sales in cases that often involve property that is owned by low- to middle-class property owners in part because those who are wealthier own their property under more stable ownership structures or utilize private ordering to avoid the chance that a court might order a forced sale under the default rules of certain common ownership structures. The Article also raises the possibility for the first time that the race or ethnicity of a property owner may affect the sales price for property sold at a forced sale, resulting in a "double discount," i.e. a discount from market value for the forced sale and a further discount attributable to the race of the property owner. If minorities are more susceptible to forced sales of their property than white property owners or if there does exist a phenomenon in which minorities suffer a double discount upon the sale of their property at a forced sale, then forced sales of minority-owned property could be contributing to persistent and yawning racial wealth gaps.

 Forced Sale Risk: Class, Race, and the "Double Discount"

This article provides a history of and information about the structure of the William H. Hastie Fellowship Program at the University of Wisconsin Law School. This article is part of a series of articles published by the Wisconsin Law Review commemorating Professor James E. Jones Jr., emeritus professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and the founder of the Hastie Fellowship Program. Forty years after this pioneering program was established, the Hastie Fellowship Program continues to represent the preeminent pipeline program that has enabled more than 30 minority lawyers to become tenure-track law professors at law schools throughout the United States. The program continues to develop minority law graduates with the potential to serve as very productive tenure-track law professors into very attractive law faculty candidates. The Article notes that those who have administered the program over the years have always have believed that those with the potential to serve as law professors exist in many places. To this end, though the Hastie Fellowship Program has had its share of Fellows who received their J.D. degrees from schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, and UCLA, it also has had a number of Fellows who received their J.D. degrees from schools such as Howard, Loyola University New Orleans, the University of Tulsa, Northeastern, North Carolina Central University, and Rutgers-Camden. Not only does the Hastie Fellowship Program continue to place its Fellows on law faculties throughout the country, but also many of the alumni from the program have had stellar, even pioneering, careers. These include former Fellows Daniel Bernstine and Stacy Leeds who became law school deans and Professor Kimberle Crenshaw, a nationally and internationally known law professor and public intellectual.

 The Hastie Fellowship Program at Forty: Still Creating Minority Law Professors

Over the past several decades, economic inequality has grown dramatically in the United States while inter-generational economic mobility has declined, which has challenged the very notion of the "American Dream." In fact, the United States is more economically unequal than most other industrialized countries. Further, there are dramatic and growing racial economic gaps in this country. Despite the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the various spinoffs it has catalyzed, there has not been any sustained, widespread social movement to address economic inequality in the United States over the course of the past several decades. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a mass social movement will emerge and endure over a long period of time in the near future to address economic inequality and growing poverty. Greater economic equality in the United States is achievable only if policymakers make fundamental changes in certain key areas of public policy impacting education, the criminal justice system, taxation, and families' ability to invest financial and non-financial resources in their children, among other areas. Although it is unlikely that the legal system can serve as a primary tool to reduce economic inequality in any substantial way, there are a number of legal strategies and initiatives that lawyers and legal organizations, including law schools, could pursue in an effort to increase economic equality and security for many Americans on the margins, including for many persons of color.

Growing Inequality and Racial Economic Gaps

Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales. Though some scholars and the media have highlighted how thousands of African-Americans have lost an untold amount of property and substantial real estate wealth as a result of partition sales, partition sales also have negatively impacted a wide range of other property owners. Some scholars have estimated that Hispanics in New Mexico lost nearly two millions acres of property in that state alone soon after the end of the Mexican-American War as a result of the manner in which land claims were settled pursuant to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Low- to moderate- income and poor white property owners in places like Appalachia have indicated to researchers that they feel at risk of losing their property as a result of partition sales. Though partition sales of tenancy-in-common property heretofore has been identified as a phenomenon impacting exclusively rural landowners, Hurricane Katrina revealed that there are a number of vulnerable tenancy-in-common property owners in urban cities and municipalities. There are even a surprising number of middle class, white property owners who own tenancy-in-common property under the default rules in some places in this country such as in Maine.

This Article, the lead article for this issue of the Alabama Law Review, reviews and analyzes the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), a uniform act that represents the most significant reform to partition law in this country in modern times. I served as the Reporter, the person charged with principal responsibility for drafting a uniform act promulgated by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, for the UPHPA. The Article summarizes those aspects of partition law that have resulted in thousands of property owners losing millions of acres of property and the real estate wealth associated with such property. The Article also provides an analysis of key sections of the UPHPA, and this analysis makes clear that the UPHPA represents a very comprehensive and innovative reform to what heretofore had long been perceived to be the intractable problem of tenancy-in-common land loss. For example, the drafters of the UPHPA drew in part on international comparative law in drafting certain sections of the UPHPA, including by drawing on the law governing exit of common ownership in countries such as Australia, Canada, England, and Scotland. Moreover, the Council of State Governments selected the UPHPA as one of thirty-five newly enacted statutes or uniform acts for inclusion in its 2013 Suggested State Legislation publication (from hundreds of submissions by state officials from across the country) to encourage states to consider it as a model. The UPHPA has been enacted into law in four states, it was introduced for consideration in four other jurisdictions in 2014, and a number of states are on the cusp of introducing it for consideration in 2015.

Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a nascent technology that threatens great harm while simultaneously promising significant benefits. Although AI possesses incredible capabilities to solve problems and complete tasks, it also poses two major threats: technological dislocation and existential catastrophe. Accordingly, the novelty and power of generative AI has led to calls for regulation, including requests for a new federal agency. This Article examines whether Congress should authorize a new federal agency for AI and, if so, what its scope of authority should be. In contemplating such regulation, it is important to consider whether existing agencies can adequately address AI’s primary threats, how a new agency could be helpful, and what costs the creation of a new agency would impose. Weighing these factors, this Article argues that a new, independent federal research agency (without regulatory authority) would adequately address the unmet threats from AI without incurring disproportionate costs.

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The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

Recent Additions

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

Forced Sale Risk: Class, Race, and the "Double Discount"

The Hastie Fellowship Program at Forty: Still Creating Minority Law Professors

Growing Inequality and Racial Economic Gaps

Reforming Property Law to Address Devastating Land Loss

Regulating into the Void: Existential Uncertainty from A.I. Necessitates a New Federal Research Agency

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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The Alledger