Joining the LSU Law faculty at the start of the 2023-24 spring semester, John A. Lovett is a passionate teacher and scholar of property law. He grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, attended Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1991. He graduated from Tulane Law School in 1995 where he served as an Articles Editor for the Tulane Law Review.

After law school, Lovett clerked for Chief Judge F.A. Little, Jr., United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, and Judge Jacques L. Wiener, Jr., United States Court of Appeal for the Fifth Circuit. He worked as an associate at Liskow & Lewis in New Orleans from 1997 to 2002, focusing on commercial litigation.

Lovett joined the faculty at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2002, became full professor in 2009, and served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Development from 2012 to 2015. He has been the De Van D. Daggett Jr. Distinguished Professor at Loyola since 2012.

Lovett’s teaching and scholarship focus on property law and land use in all its dimensions. He has taught Louisiana Civil Law Property, Common Law Property, Louisiana Sale and Lease, Land Use, and Real Estate Transactions. For the last three years, he developed and taught a new course, Property, Land Use, and Justice, that addresses the impact of racial discrimination on property law and land use in the United States and interrogates how law can remedy that legacy of discrimination.

His research interests range across common, civil, and mixed jurisdictions. He has published articles and book chapters on many property and land use topics, including easements and servitudes, adverse possession and acquisitive prescription, community land trusts, land reform in Scotland, and the impact of natural disasters on property law and housing. His law review articles and book chapters have been published in the United States, Scotland, and South Africa and have been cited widely by other scholars and courts, including the Louisiana Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa. He is a co-author of Louisiana Property Law: The Civil Code, Cases, and Commentary (2d edition, Carolina Academic Press 2020), a widely used casebook in Louisiana law schools.

Professor Lovett has deep connections to the academic legal community in Scotland where he has lectured many times. At the University of Edinburgh Law School, he was a McCormick Fellow in 2009 and a Visiting Professor from 2017 to 2020. He has been Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh Law School since 2020.  In the spring of 2023, Lovett was a Glasgow Law Fellow at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Lovett also serves as a member of the Land and Human Rights Advisory Forum for the Scottish Land Commission.

Lovett has been active in law reform for many years. Most recently, he served as Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Drafting Committee for the Uniform Easement Relocation Act, which was approved and recommended for adoption in all 50 states on July 15, 2020 and has been adopted in Nebraska, Utah, Washington, and Arkansas. He also served as Reporter for the Public Recreation Access Task Force Report, submitted to the Louisiana Legislature in January 2020. His most recent scholarly article, Submerged Land on the Louisiana Coast, Resolving the Dual-Claimed Land Dilemma, grows out of his work on the Task Force and will be published by the Louisiana Law Review in the spring of 2024.