I'm delighted to repor that Calvin Massey's new casebook, Property Law: Principles, Problems, and Cases, has just arrived in my mailbox. Perhaps most exciting to me is that it begins with The Antelope and Amistad! Very exciting — and innovative — to begin a book on property with property in humans. The book has a lot of the typical cases you'd expect in property, like Pierson v. Post, Spurr, Boomer, Tulk v. Moxhay, as well as some classic cases that are more often discussed rather than assigned (like Marengo Cave v. Ross, Solomon Guggenheim Foundation v. Lubell, Johnson v. Hendrickson, and Shelley v. Kraemer) . There are a lot of the typical cases in recent property (such as Sommer v. Kridel, Kendall v. Ernest Pestana, Riddle v. Harmon, and Brown v. Voss) — so that faculty looking to make the transition will find a lot of what they like to teach in here.
What's exciting, though, is that there are also a lot of newer cases that I think convey a sense of exciting recent developments in property — and maybe convey it in ways that are fairly straight-forward. For instance, the landlord-tenant, servitudes, and real estate transaction materials include a number of recent cases that aren't in any other casebooks. I think this has the potential to become a very, very popular property text and I hope to have the opportunity sometime soon to teach out of this.
I got it today too, and at first glance, it did look like a real possibility to try out next year. It includes a few areas that my current text leaves out (and that I therefore have to supplement).