Cornell scholar to present real property lecture on Nov. 5 at Law School

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Beverly Creamer, (808) 389-5736
Media Consultant, William S. Richardson School of Law
Posted: Oct 28, 2014

Gregory Alexander
Gregory Alexander

Well-known property law scholar Gregory S. Alexander, the A. Robert Noll Professor of Law at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York, will present the 2014 Distinguished Gifford Lecture in Real Property on November 5 at the UH Law School.

Alexander’s topic will be “Five Easy Pieces: Recurrent Themes in American Property Law.”  The lecture, free and open to the public, will be held from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Moot Courtroom on the ‘Ewa end of the Law School courtyard. Light refreshments will be served following the lecture.

The annual Gifford lectureship was established in 2002 to honor outstanding work in the field of property law by David L. Callies, the Benjamin A. Kudo Professor of Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law at UH, as well as that of prominent Hawai‘i attorney, Jerry M. Hiatt ’77.    

Each year a nationally recognized authority in property law is invited to the UH Law School for the lecture, which is sponsored annually by the Carlsmith Ball law firm.

This year’s lecture brings yet another leading scholar, who has been a member of the Cornell faculty since 1985.  Alexander is a prolific author, and was the winner of the American Publishers Association’s 1997 Best Book of the Year in Law Award for his path-breaking book, Commodity and Propriety.

Law Dean Avi Soifer noted that, over the 13 years the lectureship has been in place, Hawai‘i has had the good fortune to hear an outstanding array of property law experts from across the country.

“It is wonderfully fitting that someone of Professor Alexander’s stature will be with us to honor David Callies and Jerry Hiatt this year,” Soifer said.  “Greg’s work is consistently provocative in the very best sense and this is certain to be a lecture worth attending.”

Alexander, who has taught at UCLA, Virginia and Harvard law schools, was the Herbert Smith Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He also has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and at the Max Planck Institutes for Comparative Public Law and International Law in both Heidelberg and Hamburg, Germany.

Alexander received his JD from Northwestern University School of Law in 1973, and then clerked for The Honorable George Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  After a year as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, he joined the University of Georgia School of Law as a professor, remaining there until he moved to Cornell.