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 White Plains, NY - Despite the sub-prime mortgage crisis, US population growth in the next decades will fuel “a vibrant and growing real estate market full of opportunity and riddled with complexity for the lawyers who represent developers, landowners, tenants, financial institutions and environmentalists.”
To prepare those lawyers, Pace Law School today announced the New York Metropolitan region’s first master’s degree program in real estate law.
The growth prediction comes from two professors who will be involved in the new program, John Nolon, founder and counsel to the school’s 15 year-old Land Use Law Center, and Mark Shulman, assistant dean, graduate programs/international affairs. Their forecast is based on a recent article in the American Planning Association’s magazine Planning. It concludes
- To accommodate a 33 percent population growth of 100 million people by 2034 and replace obsolete buildings, the private sector will produce over 70 million homes and over 100 billion square feet of offices, stores, factories, institutions, hotels, and resorts.
- Two-thirds of the structures in existence in 2050 will be built between now and then.
Interactions. Only the third such program in the US (the others are at the University of Miami and the John Marshall Law School in Chicago), the Pace LL.M. in Real Estate Law will provide a distinctive interdisciplinary mix of law, business and dispute resolution. It is expected to create opportunities for law school graduates, seasoned practitioners, and lawyers looking to redirect their legal careers down what the directors call “a different, exciting, and more demanding path.” Full-time students will complete the 24-credit program in one year; part-time students can stretch it out over two. Applications are open now for classes beginning this fall.
More information is on the LL.M. website: www.law.pace.edu/realestate.html, or from the Office of Graduate Programs at (914) 422-4670 or the Program Director, Professor Shelby D. Green at (914) 422-4421.
“Real estate law has become an area in which practitioners face issues that go beyond what they were taught in three years of law school,” said Seth A. Davis of Elias Group LLP, a seasoned practitioner who is an adjunct professor at the school and will teach in the LL.M. program.
Davis added: “Today's real estate specialist must know not only the real estate field, but how it interacts with tax, corporate, environmental, land use, and many other areas of the law. An LL.M. in real estate law provides the opportunity to study these areas and interactions in depth, and to gain specialized knowledge beyond what a traditional J.D. curriculum offers or a law firm associate can hope to gain.”
Michelle Simon, Interim Dean of Pace Law School, said: “Pace Law School is immensely proud to offer a world-class graduate program in real estate law. It reflects the learning and practical skills of a school dedicated both to producing outstanding attorneys and to the wise stewardship of the human environment through sustainable development.”
Added Pace University President Stephen J. Friedman, a former senior partner in Debevoise and Plimpton LLP, “New York's real estate market is the richest and most complex in the nation. This new LL.M. program will prepare lawyers to thrive in it by providing access to cutting edge scholarship and practical experience.”
With a faculty of both tenured professors and experienced real estate practitioners, the program builds on multiple components of Pace Law School and the university of which it is part.
- The Real Estate Law Institute, created in 2004, focuses on high-profile issues like workforce housing; urban redevelopment; commercial leasing; real estate workouts; and energy conservation. It sponsors continuing legal programs, conducts research, publishes educational materials, and holds workshops to educate the industry, its lawyers, and the public.
- The Land Use Law Center is a national leader in training the local land use leaders who decide where development goes, the shape it takes, and its impact on energy consumption, the environment, and affordability. The Center has developed extensive databases of innovative land use ordinances and smart growth development strategies, and has graduated over 1,000 local officials, developers, and attorneys from its four-day intensive land use leadership training program. Pace’s environmental law program, with which it often collaborates, is consistently ranked third in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The environmental legal education program offers real estate lawyers practical grounding in key areas of practice: hazardous waste, brownfield remediation, clean air and water act regulations, and business opportunities in climate change mitigation.
- The Kheel Center on Resolution of Environmental Interest Disputes, recently created with a $1 million grant from Theodore W. Kheel, the famed mediator, provides educational programs for law students and lawyers in the techniques of discovery, fact-finding and other means of alternative dispute resolution to resolve environmental “interest disputes,” those that do not lend themselves to resolution by litigation.
- Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, known for its emphasis on practical applications of sophisticated theory, has collaborated with the Real Estate Law Institute in workshops and research and is expected to be increasingly involved in cross-disciplinary teaching in the LL.M. Program.
- In addition, the LL.M. program will draw on advisory groups of industry leaders and their attorneys.
White Plains, New York, the site of the law school, is in the middle of a growing region with a current population of over 19 million. Throughout this region legal and development issues abound as new forms of development emerge such as more compact mixed-use neighborhoods, transit-oriented development, creative public/private partnership projects in cities and urban villages, the greening of new and existing buildings, the adaptive reuse of buildings and brownfield redevelopment.
Fusion. LL.M. Program courses include “bread-and-butter” topics such as real estate transactions and finance, commercial leasing, construction law, and income taxation of real estate transactions. These will be supplemented by fusion courses such as environmental regulation of real estate development, the lawyer’s role in large-scale real estate development, environmental commercial transactions, and the legal management of urban environments. A course on real estate workouts will explore the explosion of bankruptcies due to the sub-prime mortgage fiasco and the lawyer’s role in adjusting financial obligations and expectations regarding existing financial arrangements.
Tuition for the 2008-09 year will cost approximately $40,000 for the full-time program or $1,667 per credit for part-time degree candidates. Limited financial aid may be available, but students generally are expected to arrange to finance their own programs.
Founded in 1976, Pace University School of Law has nearly 6,500 alumni throughout the country and the world. It offers full- and part-time day and evening JD programs on its White Plains, NY, campus. The School also offers the Master of Laws in Environmental Law and in Comparative Legal Studies and an SJD in environmental law. The School of Law is part of a comprehensive, independent, and diversified University with campuses in New York City and Westchester County. www.law.pace.edu.
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