Easements and Rights-of-Way: What Old Grants Authorize and What New Ones Must Say

Danaya C. Wright, T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law; Professor of Law | University of Florida Levin College of Law

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.

• Education & Credentials

Professor Wright holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. cum laude from Cornell University. She also earned an M.A. in Liberal Education from St. John’s College, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Arizona, and a B.A. in English Literature from Cornell University.

• Recognition & Leadership

Professor Wright holds a named chair as the T. Terrell Sessums and Gerald Sohn Professor in Constitutional Law. Her empirical work on testate and intestate distributions earned her a grant from the ACTEC Foundation and acclaim in the probate and trusts field, and her scholarship has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and many other courts. She has authored two chapters—on transfer-on-death deeds and on rail-trail conversions—for the preeminent property treatise Powell on Real Property.

• Professional Involvement

A widely published scholar, Professor Wright has written dozens of articles appearing in journals as diverse as the Iowa Law Review, the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, the Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law, Environmental Law, the Wisconsin Law Review, the Australian Journal of Legal History, and Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World. She has authored a popular Trusts and Estates casebook, co-authored a skills book introducing students to the practice of trusts and estates, and contributed a chapter to a forthcoming Disaster Law Handbook. Her most recent book examines the noted Chancery case in which the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley lost custody of his children because of his revolutionary and atheistic writings.

• Experience

Over a distinguished academic career, Professor Wright has taught at Arizona State University Law School, Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis, and Georgetown University Law Center in addition to UF Law, where she has taught subjects including constitutional law, property, trusts and estates, legal history, feminist theory, the constitutional law of property, and theories of property. Her scholarship has ranged across recreational trails and rails-to-trails conversions, the history of English family law, the Equal Rights Amendment and constitutional amendment procedures, constitutional takings law, drone delivery systems, and legal reforms in intestacy and probate law to address land loss and the heirs’ property problem. Through her teaching and extensive scholarship, she remains an influential voice at the intersection of legal history, property, and constitutional law.

SESSION 1 – Fee Strip or Easement: Deciding What an Old Grant Authorizes | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This 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.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Drafting for the Next Use: Purpose, Upgrade, and Co-Location Clauses in Modern Right-of-Way Grants | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

Once 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.