Law texts aren't just for future lawyers. Students in other disciplines, such as business, education, and journalism, need to learn enough about the law in their areas to stay out of trouble. Hence the need for textbooks like Real Estate Law by UNLV finance professor Robert Aalberts and University of Michigan professor George Siedel, III.
In their preface to the sixth edition, the authors say they were responding to "a need to have a real estate law textbook that combined text, short case summaries, longer teaching cases, and problems."
From a business perspective, the authors note, real estate "represents an important but frequently undermanaged asset. In the United States alone, land and structures make up about two-thirds of the nation's wealth."
The text also addresses ethical issues. For example, authors ask students to consider whether prior appropriation in water law, the idea that the first person to use water has priority over later users, regardless of who owns the land, is "a fair and moral system" of distributing water in arid and semi-arid regions.
Aalberts says the discussion of ethics is what sets the volume apart from others and helps make it the number two text on the subject in the nation's colleges. "Real estate represents for most people their largest single investment in life, and in the aggregate billions of dollars to our economy," he says. "With so much at stake, unethical activities take a very heavy toll on people and institutions."
