Commercial Leasing: A Transactional Primer

This book is the first among legal textbooks to examine a crucial component of real property practice: commercial lease law. Commercial leasing is the lifeblood of commercial real property development in the United States. Real property lawyers regularly represent landlords, tenants, and lenders in the leasing of commercial space. This is true in periods of booming real estate development, as well as in periods of economic downturn. Leasing practice is transactional and centers on a single negotiated document—the commercial lease. By the end of a course based on this book, students will have developed a genuine understanding of the major terms of the commercial office lease, the goals and objectives of parties to the transaction, and the skills crucial to effective representation.
Professors Bogart, Hammond, and Marsh have crafted a book uniquely suited to teaching this important area of practice. The book utilizes a sophisticated commercial office lease form promulgated by the ABA. Each chapter focuses on a particular lease provision. Chapters pull apart contractual language and terms of art, reveal the motivations of the parties to the deal, and, finally, examine the underlying substantive law. In addition to presenting interesting case opinions, each chapter provides numerous challenging, real-world problems. Chapters typically conclude by asking students to apply what they have learned to provisions taken from the much-publicized "Killer Lease."
The book also includes a chapter explicitly discussing professionalism, ethics, and negotiations, and contains a series of increasingly challenging drafting and negotiation exercises that force students to pull together skills and substantive law lessons.
This third edition of Commercial Leasing improves on its predecessors in many and substantial ways. First and foremost, the authors welcome Professor Tanya Marsh of the Wake Forest School of Law as a co-author. Professor Marsh is an authority in Property Law and is a Reporter for the new ALI Restatement (Fourth) of Property project. Just as importantly, Professor Marsh is a nationally recognized and sophisticated commercial leasing attorney who focused her attention on several specific areas of this text, particularly retail leasing. The text now includes a richer presentation of retail leasing issues, tied to true-to-life problems as well as documents and materials used in practice.
In the time following publication of the second edition of Commercial Leasing, law professors and administrators have been confronted with the ABA's revised learning outcomes and assessment requirements. A commercial leasing course built on this text will meet many of these ABA requirements. This commercial leasing course presents substantive law and ties this law to actual documentation and transactions. The course permits teachers to analyze the law in a sophisticated manner and trains students to write in a legal context. The course directly confronts ethical issues that regularly arise in practicen and the written assignments effectively simulate legal practice, providing an opportunity for formative assessment of student learning. Finally, the course is experiential in nature and should satisfy the ABA experiential learning requirements.
Real estate, property, and transactional law professors who want to help students to develop a real understanding of a transactions-based practice will enjoy Commercial Leasing. This book will form the basis of an exciting elective real estate transactions course.