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.

In 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.

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. 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

circumstances we were in and the extra difficulties everyone was facing with pandemic life.

One new component of the course design was the students’ first assignment: A memo summarizing the property law aspects of a recent case from the BC Court of Appeal, De Cotiis v. Hothi, 2019 BCCA 472. That is a case involving the sale of a house in Vancouver that was found to be held in a resulting trust. The students had to focus on the resulting trust analysis and how the Court decided who really owned the house.

The case also deals with issues of contract formation, agency, and the duties of real estate professionals. We planned that students would go back to it in other courses and examine the same factual situation through these other lenses. Our aim is to build some bridges between the different courses so that students gain a more integrated, holistic understanding of how legal problems cut across various areas of law.

My Real Property students were very engaged with the trust analysis in this case. We had some lively class discussion about the way the defendants, the Hothi family, used complex legal structures that created ambiguity about who really owned their various real estate holdings.

Another new initiative was a simulated negotiation that the students did in one of the class sessions. The scenario involved negotiation of a conservation covenant between a landowner and an environmental organization.

The students did a fantastic job with this and I really enjoyed reading their reflection assignments afterward. Taking on the roles of the different parties and bargaining over their rights and responsibilities seemed to make covenants come alive for the students in a more meaningful way than just reading about them. A Major Policy Change: Land Ownership Transparency During the semester, at the end of November, the Land Ownership Transparency Act came into force. The statute and its regulations bring new transparency to who truly owns real property in BC, by requiring beneficial interests to be recorded in a new Land Ownership Transparency Registry. That policy initiative was directly relevant to the concerns students had expressed when we discussed De Cotiis v. Hothi and the way trust structures can conceal who really controls and benefits from the ownership of real property.

One thing I really enjoy about teaching the Applied Legal Studies students is the fact that many of them are working in the field concurrent with pursuing the degree. There were several students in the class who had prepared filings for the new Transparency Registry. It was enriching to combine their on-the-ground practical knowledge with the work we were doing on the legal concept of a trust and on how the doctrines are applied in the case law. My Experience Teaching this course for the first time was a wonderful experience. The students were warm, bright, and perceptive. I particularly appreciated their patience with interruptions from my old, deaf pug Charlie, whose favourite time for random barking coincided with the time I would be teaching the class online from my laptop. I know they will achieve wonderful things in their careers as Notaries and legal professionals.

I’m really looking forward to meeting the next group of students in Fall 2021. s

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