Michael Heller and Jim Salzman, the authors of Mine! How the hidden rules of ownership control our lives, have written an open-source Teacher’s Manual available for free download.
Mine! is the first popular story-based book to bring together the basics of modern property law. The authors explain modern property law—the rules for who gets what and why—in an entertaining and provocative way with many current examples. The goal of Mine! is to get students charged up and excited about a course some can find intimidating or dry. Along the way, Heller and Salzman explore in a user-friendly style the most-taught property cases and core property theory concepts that every law student needs to master. The idea of Mine! is to make learning property fun.
The book has resonated with readers and critics, including the New Yorker and New York Times. Dahlia Lithwick, host of Amicus podcast, wrote in Slate: “Mine! seeks to do for ownership what Freakonomics did for incentives and what Nudge did for our cognitive biases. It opens up a new, counterintuitive, and fascinating way to think about the world that we all take for granted.”
Law professors can use Mine! either as required or recommended reading. For easy use, the authors have provided a general manual organized by cases and topics, as well as specially customized Teacher’s Manuals tying the book into use alongside three standard textbooks for Property Law: Dukeminier et al., Singer et al., and Sprankling & Coletta casebooks. Relevant excerpts from Mine! are integrated into each casebook’s table of contents along with teaching notes, making the material easy to assign. The manuals are all available for download:
Standard Manual
For property courses using other materials, with descriptions of cases and excerpts
For use with Property: A Contemporary Approach, 4th edition, Sprankling and Coletta
For use with Property Law: Rules, Policies and Practices, 7th edition, Singer, Berger, Davidson and Penalver
For use with Property, 9th edition Dukeminier, Krier, Alexander, Schill and Strahilevitz
