I have owned various pieces of real property at different times in my life. Calling land and the buildings attached to the land, "real property" is a lawyer thing. It isn’t that other property isn’t real, just that the law differentiates between types of property. It starts the first year of law school, when every fledgling lawyer has to take a “Real Property” class that teaches about old, largely unused terms like “fee simple,” “fee tail,” and “life estate.” Somewhere in

Dear Utah Legislature (and some aspiring Sociologist at Weber State University), I am writing this letter as a concerned legal practitioner of bankruptcy law. I have watched over the past five years how the number of bankruptcy filings have gone into freefall. We have experienced a 35% drop in bankruptcy filings from 2011 to 2015, from 18,414 bankruptcy cases to a mere 12,133 in 2015. As a business owner, I've been trying to figure out why there has been such a precipitous

Some facts continue to surprise me whenever I read history. Just this week I learned that our British counterparts didn’t have universal male suffrage until 1918, less than 100 years ago. Property requirements had restricted about half of the male population from having a vote in Great Britain until then. The United States didn’t start out its experiment with democracy with universal male suffrage, property rights restricted the vote for many men in the early United States.