ABA Adopts Act Recently, the American Bar Association approved a
model law called the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act.
After decades of stories about families forced to sell long-held
property at lower-than-market prices as a result of the actions
of unscrupulous real estate speculators, the law aims to produce
fairer outcomes in how land is divided among heirs. For Thomas
Mitchell, an associate law professor at University of Wisconsin
Law School and the Act’s primary drafter, this shift could be
considered years in the making. “For the past fifteen years,
families from across the country have contacted me because they
have faced the prospect of losing property that had been in
their families for generations,” Mitchell says. Years in the
Making Mitchell’s 2001 Northwestern University Law Review
article, “From Reconstruction to Deconstruction,” the seminal
article in the field, explored how forced partition sales of
tenancy in common property, referred to more commonly as heirs’
property within poor an