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The General Assembly made several minor changes affecting property law in Virginia. The most significant of these changes was the amendment of the Code's provisions regarding a spouse's dower and curtesy interests in the separate estate of a deceased spouse. In addition to this legislation, the Virginia Supreme Court decided several cases dealing with varied property issues. The decisions discussed below are those which should have the most interest to the general practitioner. The real estate specialist, no doubt, is already aware of most of them. In the majority of the cases which follow, the Virginia Supreme Court affirms and reinforces long-standing judicial precedent in Virginia. The most significant development deals with zoning regulations and residential restrictive covenants which affect group homes for the mentally handicapped. In another decision, the court had the opportunity to recognize tortious interference with a prospective contract for the sale of real estate as a cause of action for the first time.

The 1986 General Assembly may be remembered as much for what it did not do as for what it did. Carried over into the next session was House Bill 810, which would have abolished dower and curtesy in favor of a statutory share for the surviving spouse in the deceased spouse's estate. Of course, passage of this bill would have ushered in significant change in the practice of decedents' estates. Significantly, passage of the bill also would have legislatively overruled recent judicial and legislative activity which has created the sole and separate estate, for both female and male, allowing circumvention of the surviving spouse's claim of curtesy or dower. Many believe House Bill 810 is a long-awaited change whose time has come, but it must wait at least one more year. Of those bills which became law, most noteworthy was House Bill 207. Virginia Code ("Code") section 36-91(c) now provides that group homes, family care homes, or foster homes wherein no more than six physically handicapped, mentally ill, mentally retarded or developmentally disabled persons reside, with or without one or more resident counselors or staff personnel, shall be considered single family residences for the purpose of interpreting restrictive covenants executed after July 1, 1986.4 This legislation was in direct response to Omega Corp. v. Malloy a 1984 Virginia Supreme Court decision which upheld the trial court's determination that a group home for the mentally retarded does not constitute a "single-family use." A key finding in the case was that the presence of a counselor living in the home converted the residence into a facility.

Property concerns conflicts – both conflicts between individuals and conflicts of interest. Conflicts between individuals have long been the paradigmatic property focus. According to this view, property debates circle around issues of autonomy and productive competition. But this is an impoverished view. In this Article, we shift attention to conflicts of interest. By helping people manage conflicts of interest, a well-governed property system balances interdependence with autonomy and productive cooperation with productive competition. We identify three mechanisms woven throughout property law that help manage conflicts of interest: (1) internalization of externalities; (2) democratization of management; and (3) de-escalation of transactions. We show that property law predictably selects among these mechanisms depending on the ratio of economic to social benefits that people seek from a group resource. When economic concerns predominate, property law typically uses contribution-based allocations of rights and responsibilities mediated by formal, foreground procedures; while at the social end of the spectrum we tend to see more egalitarian substantive rules operating in an informal, background safety net.

As legal years go, action on the 1996 legislative and judicial fronts was relatively quiet in the area of property law. The legislative activity which spawned most of the interest was bills addressing the definitional limits of the unauthorized practice of law in real estate closings. These bills were not enacted and have been carried over for the next legislative session. Several judicial decisions, although none could be described as landmark determinations, are of interest and clarify points of law. These cases, as well as selected items of legislation which are believed to be of the most practical interest to the practitioner, are what follow.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Property Asset Management Reform Act of 2002, will enhance federal real and personal property management and bring the policies and business practices of federal agencies into the 21st century. Available data show that the federal government owns hundreds of thousands of properties worldwide, including military installations, office buildings, laboratories, courthouses, embassies, postal facilities, national parks, forests, and other public lands, estimated to be worth billions of dollars. Most of this government-owned real property is under the custody and control of eight agencies--the Department of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior, and Veterans Affairs; General Services Administration; the Tennessee Valley Authority; and the U.S. Postal Service. Federal property managers have a large deferred maintenance backlog, obsolete and underutilized properties, and changing facility needs due to rapid advances in technology. It is important that real property-holding agencies link their real property strategic plans to their missions and related capital management and performance plans; ensure that senior real property officers have the knowledge, skills, and expertise needed to effectively perform their duties; are accountable for the reliability, usefulness, and timeliness of their data; and adopt an effective process to monitor and evaluate any management tool authorized by the bill. It is equally important that GSA provides written guidance to agencies on the development of their business and asset management plans and that Congress provide appropriate control and oversight of intended and actual use of the funds retained from real property transactions."

Professor Stephen Munzer's study of property rights is an ambitious work. Drawing on sources as diverse as Hohfeld, Hegel, Locke, civic republicanism, Marx, the classic utilitarians, and Rawls, he seeks to develop a "pluralist" theory of property, one that synthesizes a variety of philosophical perspectives into a single "basic theory" that can be used to assess and promote the reform of different property systems. Like most attempts to achieve a grand philosophical synthesis, however, this one ultimately fails. The most obvious problem is that Munzer's basic theory is too vague and unwieldy to generate determinate answers to the kinds of controversies that concern legislatures and courts. A less obvious but more fundamental problem is that, although the book begins by discussing property rights, it ends as a dissertation on the distribution of wealth. In the final analysis, his basic theory is a prescription not for determining the rights persons have in specific property but for achieving distributive justice.

Economic democracy is the idea that the norms of equality and participation that classical liberalism confines to a narrowly defined sphere of government should apply to the sphere of economic life. Economic democracy thus entails a challenge to the classical liberal notion of property. In classical liberalism, property defines a realm of private enjoyment. No particular property right is a prerogative of, or a prerequisite to, citizenship, and the exercise of property rights by those who have them is not assessed in political terms. One alternative to classical liberalism responsive to the ideal of economic democracy is classical socialism. Classical socialism opposes to the liberal notion of private property the notion of state property – property controlled by the officials of a democratically constituted state. Another alternative to classical liberalism inspired in part by the ideal of economic democracy is social democracy or welfare-regulatory liberalism. Social democracy retains the classical liberal notion of private property rights, but it both qualifies them by regulatory restrictions on their exercise and supplements them with welfare rights to minimal subsistence funded and administered through a tax-transfer system. This essay is about aspects of a further alternative to classical liberalism inspired by the ideal of economic democracy. This alternative can be found in converging elements of the traditions of republicanism and market socialism. Like social democracy, the alternative rejects both state property and the unrestricted accumulation and exercise of private property rights. However, to a greater extent than social democracy, it pursues its concerns by encouraging a politically desirable primary organization of economic activity and distribution of income and wealth.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Improperly defined intellectual property rights in a government contract can result in the loss of an entity's critical assets or limit the development of applications critical to public health or safety. Conversely, successful contracts can spur economic development, innovation, and growth, and dramatically improve the quality of delivered goods and services. Contracting for intellectual property rights is difficult. The stakes are high, and negotiating positions are frequently ill-defined. Moreover, the concerns raised must be tempered with the understanding that government contracting can be challenging even without the complexities of intellectual property rights. Further, contractors often have reasons for not wanting to contract with the government, including concerns over profitability, capacity, accounting and administrative requirements, and opportunity costs. Within the commercial sector, companies identified a number of specific intellectual property concerns that affected their willingness to contract with the government. These included perceived poor definitions of what technical data is needed by the government, issues with the government's ability to protect proprietary data adequately, and unwillingness on the part of government officials to exercise the flexibilities available concerning intellectual property rights. Some of these concerns were on perception rather than experience, but, according to company officials, they nevertheless influence decisions not to seek contracts or collaborate with federal government entities. Agency officials shared many of these concerns. Poor upfront planning and limited experience/expertise among the federal contracting workforce were cited as impediments. Although agency officials indicated that intellectual property rights problems may have limited access to particular companies, they did not cite specific instances where the agency was unable to acquire needed technology. Agency officials said that improved training and awareness of the flexibility already in place as well as a better definition of data needs on individual contracts would improve the situation."

"December 19, 1987"--Transmittal letter. ; Shipping list no.: 88-58-P. ; Cover title. ; Mode of access: Internet.

"GAO-03-122." ; "January 2003." ; Title from title screen (viewed July 24, 2003). ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

This perceptive, lucid, and sympathetic account of property rights in American constitutional law by Professor James W. Ely, Jr., is further evidence of the conservative challenge to liberal orthodoxy that has emerged in recent years in American historiography. That the book appears under the cosponsorship of the Organization of American Historians, one of the more militantly liberal scholarly associations in the United States, is a small but significant sign of the changing intellectual climate. As conceived of in contemporary liberal historiography, protection of individual property rights is but one element of economic liberty. Equally if not more important, according to the legal historian Harry N. Scheiber, are the public duties and obligations of property ownership, which give rise to the idea of economic liberty as a legal construct embracing "the whole of the citizenry and . . . the prosperity of the larger society." In contrast to this view, Professor Ely bases his constitutional history of property rights on the traditional concept of economic liberty as an attribute of individual rights that is essential to personal and political liberty. Maintaining a focus on the text of the Constitution as a standard of historical judgment within changing political, social, and ideological contexts, Ely employs a historical method that incorporates the perspective of the framer's intent and rejects the relativistic assumptions of liberal historicism.

"October 2000." ; Not distributed to depository libraries in a physical form. ; Cover title. ; Includes bibliographical references (p. 22-28). ; Mode of access: Internet.

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO published a functional requirements document for property management systems. This document is intended for financial analysts, systems accountants, systems developers, property managers, program managers, and others who design, develop, implement, operate, and maintain or audit financial management systems."

Shipping list no.: 97-0375-P. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The Constitution contains two clauses that protect persons against governmental interference with their property. The Due Process Clause provides that "No person shall . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Takings Clause adds, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Both provisions appear to impose a threshold condition that a claimant have some "property" at stake before the protections associated with the Clause apply. Thus, under the Due Process Clause, it would seem that a claimant must have an interest in "property" (or in "life" or "liberty") before we move on to ask whether the state has "deprived" such a person of this interest without "due process of law." And the Takings Clause appears to require that a claimant have "private property" before we proceed to ask whether this interest has been "taken" by the government for a "public use" without the payment of "just compensation." The Supreme Court has not always been attentive to the "property" threshold under these clauses. During a brief period in the early 1970s, it spoke as if procedural due process applies to any interest that is "important," whether or not such an interest can be properly categorized as "property" (or "life" or "liberty"). In addition, cases from the 1960s and early 1970s seem to say that the substantive due process requirement of minimum rationality applies even if a claimant has no liberty or property interest.