THE EDUCATION OF BC NOTARIES
APPLIED LEGAL STUDIES 611
Real Property I Katie Sykes
Katie Sykes has been a member of the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, since 2013. At TRU, she has taught Property, Torts, Animals and the Law, Corporate Governance, International Trade Law, Lawyering in the TwentyFirst Century and Designing Legal Expert Systems. She has a JD from University of Toronto Faculty of Law, LLMs from both Harvard Law School and the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a PhD from the Schulich School of Law. Before her academic career she was a lawyer at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York.
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n the Fall 2020 semester, I taught Real Property I in the Applied Legal Studies course for the first time. Real Property I is an introductory course on real property law. It gives students a solid grounding in the basic principles of Anglo-Canadian land law, including the foundational common law doctrines, the Land Titles Act, and the title registration system.
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It was a somewhat strange and disorienting time to start teaching a new course—as all of life was somewhat strange and disorienting in 2020. But I was greatly helped out by the fact that I inherited the course from Ron Usher, an outstanding educator and lawyer who had been teaching it for years. Ron handed the course over to me with a well-designed syllabus and extensive, excellent materials I could use. I was also very fortunate to be able to sit in on Ron’s course as a guest in the preceding Winter semester, so I had a pretty good idea what to expect.
I inherited the course from Ron Usher, an outstanding educator and lawyer who had been teaching it for years. And it turned out to be a quite an advantage to be teaching a course that was designed to be delivered mainly online, in a time when university teaching all around the world had to pivot to online on short notice. Although I missed out on the chance to meet my students in real life in the in-person days that usually start off the program, for the most part I was able to teach the course with minimal disruption and to follow the framework Ron had put in place. BC Notaries Association
Course Content Property law has ancient roots. In real property law, we still regularly deal with legal concepts that date back to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, and even further, to Roman law. To understand the vocabulary and concepts they encounter in this area, students need to start with an introduction to property law’s historical origins, including the idea of an estate in land as the basic “unit” of land ownership. Those concepts can be pretty counterintuitive at first, but I found the students grasped them quickly and refined their understanding by asking thoughtful questions. We went on to cover the distinction between law and equity and the concept of a trust—the basic principles of the Torrens system of land title registration in British Columbia and nonpossessory rights in land like easements and covenants. The last third of the course covered leasehold rights in property, mortgages, and Aboriginal title. Evolving Design I made some adjustments to the course Ron had designed, for a few reasons—partly just to make the course my own, partly to coordinate with initiatives in other courses in the ALS Program under Dr. Hall’s leadership, and partly to take into account the unique Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2021
