Richard Chused

Professor of Law

Professor Chused is a prolific scholar and an expert on property law, gender and American legal history, copyright law, and cyberlaw. He joined the New York Law School faculty in 2008 after spending thirty-five years teaching and writing at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. During 2004–05, he received a Senior Scholar Fulbright Grant to teach at the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He presently serves on a Peer Review Committee that makes recommendations on grant applications for the Fulbright Program in the Middle East. Professor Chused also is a member of various history and legal history associations. He served on the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers for twelve years and as its webmaster for ten. 

He has published numerous books and articles on the legal history of gender and property law, and teaching texts in copyright and property. His published work includes the recently released third edition of his property text book for Lexis, Mt. Laurel: Hindsight is 20-20, an article contending that the famous land-use case was in some ways wrongly decided, Courts and Temperance "Ladies", a legal history piece about temperance women and their experiences in the courts of Ohio in the 1870s, Impoverished Tenants in Twentieth Century America, a chapter in a comparative law anthology on landlord-tenant law, Rewrite Copyright: Protecting Creativity and Social Utility in the Digital Age, an article on copyright law in the digital age, a lengthy history of the famous landlord-tenant case Javins v. First National Realty Corporation, and an historical essay on Myra Bradwell’s Chicago Legal News. He is presently working on a large text on gender and law in American history.

His wife, Elizabeth Langer, is an artist working in a variety of media including paint, collage and print making. Their older son, Benjamin Chused, recently completed the MBA Program at Babson College and is working at EMC outside of Boston; their younger son, Sam Langer, works at PHD, a public relations firm in New York City.

While at Georgetown Professor Chused worked on two large web projects that continue to be maintained by that institution.

The Javins Project

Professor Chused published a long history of the famous landlord-tenant case of Javins v. First National Realty Corporation. Judge J. Skelly Wright's opinion in the case, Javins v. First National Realty Corp., 428 F.2d 1071 (D.C. Cir. 1971), was the first to recognize that an implied warranty of habitability defense was available to tenants sued for possession for non-payment of rent. It is a staple of first year courses in property. Chused's article, Saunders (a.k.a. Javins) v. First National Realty Corporation, 11 Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy 191-247 (2004), provides detailed information on the political, social and racial issues in the case, as well as previously unavailable details about the lenghty course of the litigation. An abridged version of the paper may be found in Gerald Korngold & Andrew Morriss (eds.), Property Stories 123-170 (2d Ed. 2009). As part of the project and with the help of the Williams Library at Georgetown University Law Center, Chused gathered all of the papers in the various legal proceedings. Copies of those papers (now housed in Special Collections at the Williams Library at Georgetown University Law Center), together with some pictures and commentary, are available on a site maintained by the library.

The Gender and Legal History Paper Project

During his long tenure on the faculty at Georgetown University Law Center Professor Chused taught a seminar in Gender and Law in American History. Many of the students in that class agreed to allow copies of their seminar papers to be distributed to educators, students and historians on request. The papers are a rich source for those interested in the variety of ways gender has been a subject of legal concern. Summaries of the available papers and instructions for obtaining copies are available on a site which is now maintained by Special Collections in the Williams Library at Georgetown University Law Center. Anyone with questions may also contact Professor Chused at New York Law School.