Program Details
2026-12-18 12:00:00
Over 1,000+ webinars
Course Overview
2026-12-18 12:00:00
2h CLE Credits
Intermediate
2
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm ESTThis session examines how courts determine whether an old deed or right-of-way grant conveys a fee simple strip or a mere easement — a distinction that controls mineral rights, reversionary claims, and authorized uses for decades after the original transaction. Attorneys will learn the interpretive framework courts apply to granting clauses, habendum clauses, and surrounding circumstances, and will trace how that initial classification drives downstream disputes over abandonment, reversion, and scope of authorized use. Attendees will leave able to analyze legacy grants, spot fee-vs.-easement ambiguities, and advise clients on litigation exposure and transactional risk.
Danaya C. Wright 1:10 pm - 2:10 pm ESTOnce a corridor is classified, the fights move to what the grant permits — and modern infrastructure keeps testing that boundary. This session takes the scope-expansion litigation of the last three decades, from fiber optic installations on railroad and electric corridors through Boerschig v. Rio Grande Electric Cooperative (Tex. 2026) and the pending class actions, and turns it into drafting practice. Attorneys will learn how purpose language, upgrade and co-location provisions, apportionment and sublicensing terms, compensation triggers, and termination clauses either authorize or foreclose the next generation of use, and how state statutory regimes such as Texas Utilities Code § 43.053 and the Indiana FIBRE Act shift drafting burden between the legislature and the practitioner. Attendees leave with clause-level guidance for grants that must survive technology changes they cannot yet name.
Danaya C. WrightDanaya C. Wright is the T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she has taught since 1998. A prolific legal historian and scholar, she teaches and writes across constitutional law, property, trusts and estates, legal history, and feminist theory. Her research spans nineteenth-century English divorce and marriage law, nineteenth-century American property rights involving railroads and utilities, women’s rights and constitutional protections, and cutting-edge questions such as the property implications of drone delivery systems—work that has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal and state courts.
Danaya C. Wright is the T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she has taught since 1998. A prolific legal historian and scholar, she teaches and writes across constitutional law, property, trusts and estates, legal history, and feminist theory. Her research spans nineteenth-century English divorce and marriage law, nineteenth-century American property rights involving railroads and utilities, women’s rights and constitutional protections, and cutting-edge questions such as the property implications of drone delivery systems—work that has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal and state courts.
Requirements
The Alabama State Bar MCLE Commission requires attorneys to complete 12 credits, including 1 ethics, by December 31 of each year. All credits must be reported by February 15 of the following year. A maximum of 12 credits, including 1 ethics credit, may be carried over for 1 year only.
Formats
