Current Issues For Higher Education Real Estate Lawyers

The 15^th Annual Higher Education Real Estate Lawyers conference was held in San Francisco, where attendees listened to and learned from both in-house and outside counsel at colleges and universities on the following topics.

Real Estate Tax Exemption – The Princeton Case.

(Hannah Ross General Counsel [Middlebury College], formerly University Attorney at Princeton University).

Princeton University recently settled litigation in which residents of the Town of Princeton, New Jersey challenged the University's property tax exemption for its campus alleging that notwithstanding Princeton's 501(c)(3) status, it was not a qualified tax exempt entity because it engaged in commercial and/or profit seeking and profit driven conduct and distribution of profits. This claim was brought in 2011 against both Princeton and the taxing municipality and alleged that Princeton's distribution of "tens of millions of dollars in profit" in patent royalties to faculty, "operation of a