For decades heirs’ property remained in the shadows

Prior to the early 2000s, there were only a relatively small number of scholars and researchers in a very small number of disciplines who published scholarship about heirs’ property. Very few prominent media outlets had ever published any articles addressing any heirs’ property matters though some newspapers in a limited number of mostly southern states had published some articles beginning, with few exceptions, in the 1970s (e.g. Adams and Saunders Reference Adams and Saunders1980; Arnold Reference Arnold1978; Sikora Reference Sikora1978). Elected officials and other policymakers showed little interest in addressing heirs’ property problems that were negatively impacting both disadvantaged communities and individuals. And hardly any funders, whether governmental or from private philanthropy, provided any funding to address heirs’ property matters. As a result of this combination of factors, very few people in the general public ever had heard about heirs’ property, let alone knew anything about the many serious problems associated with such ownership.

For decades, scholarship about heirs’ property was generally confined to a limited number of scholars and researchers in a small number of social science disciplines, including most prominently anthropology and rural sociology and some from economics and agricultural economics. In addition to such social science research, there was a smaller body of legal scholarship that addressed heirs’ property issues. With some limited exceptions, there was little cross-fertilization among the social scientists as a group and with legal scholars and practicing lawyers. This lack of cooperation sometimes resulted in misunderstanding: social scientists sometimes had difficulty understanding the legal jargon and laws on heirs’ property ownership, resulting in mischaracterization of the legal features of heirs’ property ownership and the nature of the laws governing such ownership. At the same time, much of the legal scholarship was not informed by social science research, which sometimes resulted in publications that evidenced a lack of awareness about the magnitude of heirs’ property ownership, including in places such as Appalachia, as well as the many ways in which heirs’ property owners value their property both for economic and non-economic reasons.

Until about ten years ago, heirs’ property was not a recognized legal term, with not a single legal casebook, textbook, or treatise that recognized the term or even glancingly referred to it. Instead, it was a colloquial expression, though one widely used within communities of different races and ethnicities with a prevalence of heirs’ property ownership and also one often used in the previously referenced media publications that began to appear in the 1970s. A small number of legal scholars published articles about heirs’ property with only a few referring to it as such. They typically instead referred to such ownership as tenancy-in-common ownership, which is the broader category of which heirs’ property is a subset.

The legal scholars who published articles about heirs’ property matters were essentially divided into two groups. One group, which I will call the legal humanists, claimed that some key property laws impacting heirs’ property owners were undermining such ownership, reinforcing claims of grassroots advocates. The other group whose members were affiliated with the law-and-economics field – a scholarly field in which scholars utilize microeconomic theory to analyze the law – concluded that those same laws in fact were working well. However, the legal scholarship addressing heirs’ property ownership was siloed as the law-and-economics scholars who claimed that the extant law was working well did not reference any scholarship published by the legal humanist scholars who believed that the extant law was quite unjust and needed to be reformed in a major way, and vice versa. The one thing the two groups had in common was that almost no scholar in either group based their conclusions on any empirical data, though some in the legal humanist camp had anecdotal evidence of families that had involuntarily lost their heirs’ property. Some of the non-empirical scholarship produced by the law-and-economics professors did not draw upon any data at all nor reference any relevant published legal opinions to support their categorical, unsupported claims that judges had been applying partition law in careful and appropriate ways that resulted in wealth being maximized (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005).

Until very recently, even among researchers, many media people, and some others who had some familiarity with heirs’ property as a result of their professional work, the prevailing view was that those who owned heirs’ property were almost exclusively African American families that owned farmland in the rural South. Very few people knew that many low- to moderate-income white families, Latino families, native Hawaiian families, and others including some Native Americans, also own heirs’ property. Even fewer knew that heirs’ property also is prevalent in a number of urban places. To this day, many heirs’ property owners themselves know that they have substantial problems with their property ownership but do not realize that they own heirs’ property and that significant features of such ownership contribute to the very property problems they experience.

The first empirical study done about heirs’ property was published in 1978 by Gloria Bromell Tinubu, a graduate student in agricultural economics at the time. Her study estimated that 1,640,000 acres of South Carolina’s 19.4 million acres of land may have been heirs’ property (Tinubu and Hite Reference Tinubu and Hite1978).Footnote ² For decades, the most prominent empirical study about heirs’ property remained the groundbreaking heirs’ property study published by the Emergency Land Fund in 1980,Footnote ³ under the direction of its founder, economist Robert S. Browne. Although incomplete and flawed in certain ways, the Emergency Land Fund study remained the principal empirical heirs’ property study for more than thirty years and was cited over and over again during this period in large part due to the lack of other substantial empirical studies.

Due to the dearth of such empirical studies and certain conflicting claims that were made about such ownership in what I referred to as “an empirical vacuum,” I made a call twenty years ago for more researchers to conduct empirical research on a range of issues associated with Black land ownership and loss, including on various heirs’ property issues (Copeland and Buchanan Reference Copeland and Buchanan2019). The lack of a robust body of empirical research about heirs’ property and heirs’ property adjacent issues contributed to little being known about (1) the magnitude of such ownership at the state and national levels; (2) the various types of places where heirs’ property is particularly prevalent; (3) substantial racial and ethnic differences in will-making and estate planning; and (4) a very incomplete specification of legal and other issues various heirs’ property owners face, among many other issues.

Further, with limited exceptions, the only legal issue front of mind was how real estate developers, speculators, and sometimes family members with fractional interests would use an archaic property law, known as “partition law,” to force the sale of Black-owned heirs’ properties. Such court-ordered, forced sales often have occurred even when a majority of family members who owned a majority of the fractional interests in a parcel of family-owned property – often a property a family continuously had owned for many generations – opposed the requested sale, wanting to maintain ownership of the family’s property to preserve the family’s heritage and generational wealth. Sadly, because partition law is very counterintuitive in many ways, many of these families only learned how partition law actually works in practice after a partition lawsuit was filed against them and after they ended up losing their property as a result of a court-ordered, forced partition sale.

Even though there was some awareness among some stakeholders about how partition law contributed to Black land loss and undermined family heritage, cultural, and in some cases historic value, there was little appreciation about how these forced sales negatively impacted generational wealth. Many people wrongly assumed that court-ordered, forced partition sales typically yield a market value price, leaving the impacted families economically whole for the most part, though dispossessed of their family property (Mitchell, Malpezzi and Green Reference Mitchell, Malpezzi and Green2010). Certain law-and-economics scholars contributed to this misunderstanding by claiming that partition sales were wealth maximizing despite the fact that a partition sale is a type of forced sale that lacks any of the necessary elements for a sale to be deemed one that is conducted under conditions that will yield a fair market value price. Certain members of the legal humanist group who were not well versed in law-and-economics theory let alone economics, conceded the point that partition sales were wealth maximizing, though they believed that partition law should be reformed to vindicate certain non-economic values. The claims about the mythical wealth maximizing benefits of court-ordered, forced partition sales remained unchecked until I published an article in 2010 along with two real estate economist co-authors that exposed the severely flawed economic analysis that formed the basis of these erroneous claims (ibid).

The fundamental flaw that law-and-economics scholars made in conflating fair market value with forced-sale value is glaring given that in law, economics, and business, including among academics, legal practitioners, businesspeople, and judges in these fields, the distinction between a sale conducted under conditions designed to yield a market value price and a forced sale is very well understood. To this end, in a seminal Supreme Court bankruptcy case, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that “market value, as it is commonly understood, has no applicability in the forced-sale context; indeed, it is the very antithesis of forced-sale value.”Footnote ⁴ Just as forced sales in the context of bankruptcy yield below-market prices, court-ordered forced partition sales almost always yield sale prices significantly below what one would expect the market value price to be, and it is not uncommon for such sales to yield a fire sale price. Given that heirs’ property represents the largest asset for many disadvantaged families, partition sales have had a devastating impact on many families’ generational wealth, and they also have contributed to exacerbating racial and ethnic wealth gaps given that Black and brown families disproportionately own heirs’ property.

The substantial economic deficiencies in the law-and-economics scholarship addressing heirs’ property have been compounded by the fact that heirs’ property issues as a whole have received little attention among economists who do empirical, applied research as Burnett and Winters-Michaud (Reference Burnett and Winters-Michaud2025) make clear in their published study, which is part of this collection of papers. This is ironic given that an agricultural economist and an economist, both African-American, did groundbreaking work in the late 1970s and early 1980s as referenced previously, which substantially increased awareness about heirs’ property at that time: in the case of Gloria Tinubu’s research, within South Carolina, and in the case of the study Robert Browne led, throughout the South and even beyond. The good news is that there is a substantial, constructive role economics could play in helping develop a much better understanding about a range of critically important heirs’ property issues. For those interested in developing well-designed policy solutions to address certain heirs’ property matters, such present-day economic research would enhance their ability to develop some potentially impactful proposals in a much more informed way.

Although some acknowledged that many state partition laws governing partition actions involving heirs’ property ownership were unjust, most lawyers and others at least somewhat familiar with the involuntary loss of Black-owned heirs’ properties believed that the impacted African Americans fundamentally lacked sufficient economic and political power to convince elected officials and other important stakeholders to take up their cause. As mentioned previously, it was widely assumed that most heirs’ property parcels were owned by economically disadvantaged African Americans and that the properties in question almost exclusively consisted of farmland located in the rural South.Footnote ⁵ There also was a narrative that Black farm owners and heirs’ property owners – groups that were widely, if incorrectly, understood to be synonymous – were doomed to extinction, with some even indicating that the most that could be done for these groups was to document that they once existed so that future generations could learn about their prior, if relatively brief, existence. This narrative, which was articulated by some in the media and some in academia, had gained some broad acceptance in many corners, making the task of trying to convince elected officials and policymakers to take action to help heirs’ property owners even harder due to a belief that it was simply too late to do anything that would help in any meaningful way.

Although the Emergency Land Fund report did identify four other laws that contributed to Black land loss, there were almost no scholarly works that addressed the impact on heirs’ property owners of these other legal processes. The lack of empirical research about how these various legal processes contributed to imperiling heirs’ property ownership contributed to ascribing some outsized importance to partition law and marginalizing the impact the other property and tax laws had on undermining heirs’ property ownership. For example, there remains no empirical evidence supporting the oft-repeated claim that partition sales represent the greatest source of Black land loss, a claim that is still repeated by some to this day, and one for which there are good reasons to at least question.

Heirs’ property field has grown tremendously in the past 25 years

It would be nearly impossible to overstate the surprising growth the heirs’ property field has experienced over the course of the past twenty-five years. Tenancy-in-common ownership, the broader category of ownership under which heirs’ property falls, and partition law that governs exit from such ownership, were not areas of property law that had generated much interest among property scholars at any point over the course of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries though they have been core parts of the property law canon for generations. In 2000, the term heirs’ property was not even a recognized term in most circles, and the more general issue of Black land loss, under which much of the limited scholarship at that time about what we now know as heirs’ property fell, was considered a marginal, backwater, niche issue at best within and outside of academia.

The underlying issues that led to Black land loss over the course of many decades were widely considered intractable and irremediable due to power dynamics that many important stakeholders believed were determinative and not susceptible to change. Today, numerous private, governmental, academic, nonprofit, legal aid, philanthropic, media, and other organizations – including most recently some financial institutions and nonprofit organizations working on developing loan products specifically tailored for heirs’ property owners – know at least a little bit about heirs’ property, and many know a fair amount, which represents a sea change in awareness over the course of the past ten to fifteen years. Although a relatively small percentage of people in the general public are aware of the issue, there are significantly more people who have such awareness than was the case even a few years ago for reasons described below.

Without question, the development that served as the catalyst for ultimately enabling heirs’ property to be taken out of the shadows and into the light was an award-winning, three-part series on Black land loss that the Associated Press (AP) published in 2001, a series that included an article addressing how real estate speculators and developers had long used partition law to undermine heirs’ property ownership (Lewan and Barclay Reference Lewan and Barclay2011). It is worth noting that even the AP article addressing unjust partition laws and the ways in which predatory speculators and real estate developers took advantage of these state laws did not use the term heirs’ property. Not only did the AP article help raise some public awareness but it also served as the catalyst for the American Bar Association’s Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Section (RPTE Section) to get involved in the effort to try to resolve heirs’ property issues by forming a task forced that was called the Property Preservation Task Force (PPTF). The PPTF, which I served on, developed a proposal that was sent to the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), requesting the ULC to form a drafting committee to develop a model state statute (a uniform act in the ULC’s lexicon) to reform partition law in some substantial ways (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2014). The ULC accepted the RPTE Section’s proposal and formed a drafting committee.

I served as the “reporter” for the committee. The reporter is the person on the drafting committee vested with principal authority for drafting a uniform act in consultation with the other members of the drafting committee. During the course of drafting the act, the name of the act was changed a few times from its original name – the Uniform Partition of Tenancy-In-Common Real Property Act – before the ULC finally agreed to change the name of the act one last time to the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act at my urging. I advocated for the change because even though heirs’ property was not an officially recognized legal term at the time, many of those most impacted by partition law referred to their ownership as heirs’ property. Most of these owners, however, had no idea what the term tenancy in common meant.

Given this fact, these owners and perhaps others committed to helping improve conditions for heirs’ property owners would be much more likely to find out about the act if the title of the act included the term that they were familiar with themselves. I believed that such a name change might have at least two benefits. First, I believed that it could help build support for efforts to enact the UPHPA into law because there would be a greater chance that sympathetic individuals or groups would find out about the act and then be part of the effort to enact the UPHPA into law. Second, I believed that if the UPHPA became law in a particular state that those who owned heirs’ property in that state would be much more likely to learn about the existence of the law and the enhanced protections it afforded them if the term heirs’ property was part of the act’s title.

Both of these intuitions proved sound after the ULC approved and promulgated the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA) in July 2010 (Uniform Law Commission 2010). The UPHPA became the law in Arkansas, for example, after someone who was searching for solutions to her family’s heirs’ property problems came across the UPHPA while conducting research online – research that included her use of the search term “heir property,” which is how many people in Arkansas reference such ownership. After discovering the UPHPA during the course of her research, she showed incredible initiative and determination in spearheading the successful drive to get it enacted into law in Arkansas. In addition, there have been families that own heirs’ property in states such as Alabama and New York who found out about the UPHPA through media publications that used the term heirs’ property and who were then able to fend off real estate speculators who had tried to use partition law to force the sale of their properties.

One of the most dramatic developments in the heirs’ property field over the course of the past twenty-five years – if not the most dramatic development – has been the incredible success of the UPHPA. Even fifteen years ago, most lawyers and other stakeholders familiar with partition law believed that it would be a fool’s errand to spend any significant time, resources, or energy in an effort to try to reform partition law. Fifteen years later, the UPHPA has been enacted into law in twenty-four states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, states and jurisdictions in which seventy-percent of the U.S. population lives as seven of the ten largest states by population have adopted the UPHPA.Footnote ⁶ Over the course of the next few years, several additional states will consider enacting the UPHPA into law. In addition, by proving wrong the cynics who believed that law and policy could never be harnessed to improve conditions for heirs’ property owners, successful partition law reform has helped generate additional legal reform and policy interventions – at both the state and federal levels – to benefit heirs’ property owners.

The completely unexpected success of the UPHPA and the fact that our drafting committee consciously used the terms heirs’ property in the title of the act has helped generate an almost immeasurable amount of additional interest in heirs’ property, though there are other factors that also have contributed to the growth in interest. Interest among those in the media about heirs’ property matters has grown from a limited number of articles in some newspapers in a small number of mostly Southern states thirty years ago to literally hundreds of articles over the course of the past few years. The new wave of media attention includes many articles in major national newspapers, magazines, and other outlets. In addition to the newspaper and magazine articles, there have been numerous podcasts, radio programs, televised investigative reports, and documentaries. The documentaries include an award-winning, feature-length documentary film called Gaining Ground: The Fight for Black Land,Footnote ⁷ which addresses issues Black farmers and heirs’ property owners face, and an award-winning VICE News investigative report called Losing Ground.Footnote ⁸

The dramatic uptick in coverage of heirs’ property matters among various media outlets, the substantial interest the UPHPA has generated in heirs’ property, the formation in the past twenty-five years of vibrant nonprofit organizations that are working in the heirs’ property space as well as new or enhanced heirs’ property programs within existing organizations, and enhanced funding to enable much higher levels of heirs’ property research has generated substantially more research on heirs’ property issues than ever has been produced before. The surge in heirs’ property research has been generated by scholars and researchers with training in a number of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, economics, and law.

Increased research has improved the understanding of various heirs’ property issues though much more research needs to be done

Over the course of the past twenty years, there has been a monotonic increase in research and scholarship about heirs’ property. Whereas in 2004, there were no published legal academic articles addressing heirs’ property that one could find on Westlaw, in 2024 there were more than twenty such articles. Similarly, there has been a surge in social science scholarship addressing heirs’ property over the course of the past twenty years, including scholarship from researchers in the fields of rural sociology, anthropology, sociology, forestry, and, to a much lesser degree, in economics and agricultural economics.

In just the past five to ten years, there have been significantly more empirical studies published about heirs’ property and adjacent matters than ever had been published before. These publications have made a substantial contribution in improving what is known about heirs’ property in terms of various characteristics of such property and about issues that contribute to the formation of heirs’ property in the first instance or which can lead to heirs’ property becoming further fractionated once it already has been formed. As a result of these studies, for example, we now know that there is a very substantial amount of heirs’ property in this country, which is in stark contrast to what most people had assumed (Dobbs and Johnson Gaither Reference Dobbs and Gaither2023; Housing Assistance Council 2023; Pew Charitable Trusts 2021; Pippin, Jones and Johnson Gaither Reference Pippin, Jones and Johnson Gaither2017; Thomson and Bailey Reference Thomson and Bailey2023; Winters-Michaud et al. Reference Winters-Michaud, Burnett, Callahan, Keller, Williams and Harakat2023); that a great deal of heirs’ property is located in both rural and urban places though it is disproportionately prevalent in rural areas (Housing Assistance Council 2023); that many heirs’ properties or inherited properties – whether agricultural or residential – have lower property values than other agricultural and residential properties that are not heirs’ properties or inherited properties; that Black and Hispanic older homeowners make wills or trusts at a rate that is approximately thirty-five to forty percent below the rate that white older homeowners make wills or trusts; and that these Black and Hispanic older homeowners are much more likely than older white homeowners to have a range of conditions that often are the precursor to the formation of heirs’ property (Walsh, Neal and Zinn Reference Walsh, Neal and Zinn2024).

Callahan and Keller (Reference Callahan and Keller2025) make an important contribution by evaluating several empirical studies published over the course of the past six years that seek to estimate the prevalence of heirs’ property at the local, county, regional, or national level. Their study notes a significant concern of little overlap in the results of seven different methodological strategies used to identify heirs’ property, calling into question the efficacy of these various estimation methods. They also note that, due to concerns about publishing studies with more fine-grain information about specific parcels of heirs’ property, researchers engaged in trying to estimate the prevalence of heirs’ property often withhold certain methodological details, which makes it difficult to assess the reasons different studies have such different estimates of the prevalence of heirs’ property. Nevertheless, as the authors of the paper note, the various empirical studies estimating the prevalence of heirs’ property have made a very substantial contribution to the development of the heirs’ property field in that, as a group, they prove that heirs’ property is a pervasive phenomenon throughout the United States (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Dobbs, Gaither and Thomson2023). In short, the studies demonstrate that heirs’ property owners are not close to extinction as many had assumed twenty-five years ago.

Burnett and Winters-Michaud (Reference Burnett and Winters-Michaud2025) do some appropriate level-setting and remind us that in certain disciplines, including economics, heirs’ property still receives little attention. Burnett and Winters-Michaud note the obvious benefits of empirical studies that seek to quantify the magnitude of heirs’ property. However, they note that all of the studies quantifying the magnitude of heirs’ property ownership that were published before their current article in this special edition have been cross-sectional studies, which has not allowed various stakeholders to understand trends in the rate at which property acquires and loses its characterization as heirs’ property over time.

Their study reveals that between 2015 and 2021 there were only comparatively small decreases in both the number of heirs’ property parcels and the total acreage of heirs’ property in the continental United States. They note, however, that the comparatively minimal changes in the number of heirs’ property parcels and total acreage of these heirs’ properties mask the fact that there was substantial churn in the status of the properties in their study. By providing evidence about trends in the creation and cessation of heirs’ property, future research can build upon the Burnett and Winters-Michaud study by seeking to assess why many heirs’ property parcels cease to be heirs’ property over time and why so much heirs’ property continues to be created. Not only does this type of research make a contribution to the fledgling field of research about the prevalence of heirs’ property ownership but also this type of longitudinal research can help better inform policymakers interested in addressing various heirs’ property issues.

Thompson, Wear, and Boyd (Reference Thompson, Wear and Boyd2025) primarily consider the distributional impacts on disadvantaged forest-dependent communities of potential policies and government and private-sector investments designed to enhance the role that forests and the wood products industry play in mitigating climate change through forest carbon sequestration and other carbon dioxide removal initiatives. They note that the policy incentives they focus upon would likely yield significant, positive net economic and environmental impacts. They also note that if no new forest carbon policy incentives are developed and implemented in the near future that there would be a substantial loss of forestland in the next decade or so, with adverse environmental impacts according to experts who do work at the intersection of climate change and land use.

The authors note, however, that implementation of the forest policy incentives they discuss not only may disproportionately benefit wealthy, individual and corporate forest owners, but that some of the incentives could actually harm disadvantaged forest communities. For example, larger corporate forest owners well-positioned to capitalize on certain new programs could expand their forest holdings by acquiring small, family-owned forests because these families often do not have the capacity to access these programs themselves, thereby making their ownership less profitable and more insecure. The authors note that minority forest owners could be particularly at risk of losing their forestland because in addition to the typical problems many white families experience in accessing many forest programs, minority owners often experience other barriers – such as owning their forests under the problematic heirs’ property ownership form. To promote equity, the authors recommend that the climate-mitigating forest policies they discuss in their article incorporate provisions such as robust technical assistance, which would better enable disadvantaged forest communities to benefit from the policies, including by enabling disadvantaged forest owners to maintain and expand their forests.

Kim et al. (Reference Kim, Green, Johnson Gaither and Dobbs2025) also make a very important contribution to further developing an important, growing body of empirical research on heirs’ property that has focused on documenting the prevalence of heirs’ property in various geographical regions, the economic value of heirs’ property, and socioeconomic factors associated with its prevalence. Their study builds upon earlier studies by using spatial autocorrelation methodologies to document spatial clusters of heirs’ property using county-level data from counties throughout the United States; by analyzing the relationship between certain socioeconomic and demographic data in the counties with a cluster of heirs’ property and the spatial distribution of heirs’ property throughout the country; and by revealing spillover effects of interventions to address certain heirs’ property problems in one county that can positively influence neighboring counties.

The article is novel in certain respects both methodologically and in terms of some of its findings. The authors capitalize upon relatively recent technological advances in geoprocessing technology and big data handling, including by appearing to be the first researchers to analyze socioeconomic and demographic characteristics from a spatial perspective across all counties in the United States and the relationship between these county-level characteristics and the spatial distributions of heirs’ property. In terms of findings, the authors reveal that there are certain socioeconomic factors that are strongly associated with areas with a high concentration of heirs’ property that previous research did not fully consider, factors that appear to be more strongly correlated with heirs’ property prevalence than poverty, which previous studies had claimed to be the factor most strongly correlated with a high prevalence of heirs’ property. Importantly, echoing Burnett and Winters-Michaud, the authors note that their study has some limitations. For example, they note that they relied upon cross-sectional data and not longitudinal data, which may have dampened their ability to capture significant temporal trends.

Although the increased generation of heirs’ property scholarship represents a positive development and has contributed to moving heirs’ property out of the shadows, far more research needs to be done if the heirs’ property field is to develop in some robust ways and in ways that can better inform policymakers interested in addressing a range of problems associated with heirs’ property ownership. In law, although there have been significantly more publications addressing heirs’ property issues in the past ten years than there were previously, most of these publications continue to focus on partition law, which is just one of many legal issues that impact heirs’ property ownership. If legal scholars as a whole want to make a greater contribution to growing the heirs’ property field instead of plowing the same furrow other scholars have plowed, they will need to produce scholarship that more fully addresses the range of legal issues that impact heirs’ property ownership. These issues include but are not limited to various tax law and environmental law issues, legal and other barriers that stymie the ability of heirs’ property owners to clear title to their property and the devastating consequences of having unclear title, as well as the other legal processes that often lead to involuntary sales of heirs’ property such as eminent domain, tax lien sales, adverse possession, and laws governing property foreclosure. In addition, very little of the legal scholarship draws upon any empirical research but instead tends to rely upon anecdotal evidence or otherwise largely unsupported claims, including some legal scholarship that addresses the efficacy of the UPHPA.

Social science researchers can also play a meaningful role in helping grow the heirs’ property field. Empirical researchers could, for example, work with legal scholars to improve knowledge about the degree to which certain legal processes contribute to involuntary sales of heirs’ property. Among other possible findings, such research could either verify or disprove the claim that partition sales account for most involuntary transfers of heirs’ property. Social science researchers also could follow up on the Burnett and Winters-Michaud study by conducting more longitudinal studies of heirs’ property owners and by pursuing research that would shed light on some of the trends their study reveals. For example, future research could seek to better account for why a substantial number of heirs’ properties lose their heirs’ property status over time. Is this trend a result of substantial involuntary loss of heirs’ property, substantial numbers of voluntary sales of heirs’ properties between willing heirs’ property owners and willing buyers, the transmutation of heirs’ property ownership into some other ownership form facilitated by certain policy interventions designed to resolve problematic heirs’ property ownership, or some combination of explanations? Further, economists could seek to evaluate partition sales conducted both under general state partition laws and under the UPHPA, which replaces the general partition law’s default auction sales with an open-market sales procedure that is designed to mimic in substantial ways a sale between a willing seller and a willing buyer on the open market. Such research would shed much needed light on the generational wealth impacts of partition sales and of the efficacy of the UPHPA.