REAL PROPERTY-ALIENATION-LIMITATION

Authors

Abstract

In the field of property as in that of personal rights (including contract) we still encounter occasionally the specter of certain supposedly absolute rights. The courts have had to declare often enough that the owner's rights of use are limited by the like rights of other owners, by considerations of public policy, public convenience, etc.; it is not so often that a court deals explicitly with the limitations upon an owner's power of disposing and leasing his property. In Terrace v. Thompson, recently decided by the United States Supreme Court (Nov. 12, 1923) it was urged by a United States citizen, that, as owner of land in the state of Washington, he had the lawful power to sell or lease his property to an alien; that this power was guaranteed to him by the "due process clause'' of the 14th Amendment and that a statute of Washington, which made it a misdemeanor "knowingly to transfer land or the right to the control, possession, or use of land" to an alien, was therefore unconstitutional and void. The court however denied these contentions and held, that ''The 24th Amendment, as against the arbitrary and capricious or unjustly discriminatory action of the state, protects the owners in their right to 1ease and dispose of their land for lawful purposes, * * * but it does not take away from the state those powers of police that were reserved at the time of the adoption of the Constitution."

Recommended Citation

REAL PROPERTY-ALIENATION-LIMITATION, 22 Mich. L. Rev. 355 (1924).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol22/iss4/6