Introduction

• Author: Alan R. Romero
• Profession: Professor of law and Director of the Rural Law Center at the University of Wyoming College of Law
• Pages: 1-6

Introduction

P

roperty is everywhere around you. Wherever you go in the United

States, the part of Earth you’re on is the property of some person,

entity, or government. If you look around you, almost everything you see is

property — and it’s not just the land. Almost everything visible and tangible

is property, except for the people themselves. Even some things you can’t

see are property. Property law touches all of it.

Property law is about your relationship to all those things around you. It

determines what you can do with those things and what you can stop other

people from doing with those things. It governs how you acquire a right to

possess and use a thing and exclude others from it. It directs how you can

give that right to others.

You may be very familiar with property but not so familiar with property law.

I wrote this book to help you understand those legal rules that are shaping

the world around you in so many ways.

About This Book

Property Law For Dummies gives you the short and simple version of the

property rules that are generally the subject of first-year law school courses

in property law. I don’t cite many cases or include footnotes, so this book

doesn’t look much like other law books. My goal is to organize, simplify,

and clarify the basic rules of property law to make the subject easier to

understand.

If you’re a law student, you know that your job in law school isn’t just to

learn legal rules. You’re also learning how and why those legal rules are

created and changed and how to apply them and make persuasive arguments

about them. You’re learning how to figure out what the rules are by reading

cases, statutes, and regulations. But you may find that in the process of

reading cases, making arguments, considering possible rules and approaches,

and exploring the reasons for rules, you sometimes have a hard time simply

identifying what the rule is. That’s where this book can help.

You don’t have to read through the whole book in order to understand each

part. You can turn to any issue you’re studying and find what you need to

know. Some issues relate to other issues, of course, so often you find references

to other chapters that you can turn to for more detail.