Interpreting Stale Preferential Rights to Acquire Real Estate: Beyond the Restatement of Property

I MAGINE that the owner of an environmentally sensitive site in a scenic town wants to preserve the land's natural beauty and protect an important aquifer.The landowner agrees to sell the property to the town at a price far below its fair market value, subject to a use restriction requiring that the land be maintained in its natural state.There is, however, a potential problem: the current owner acquired the site some twenty years ago under a deed that granted to the prior owner and his children a right of first refusal to purchase, exercisable whenever the current owner might decide to sell the property.Should one of the children, wishing to profit from the land's development potential, be able to prevent the proposed sale or even preempt the sale and acquire the property at the discounted price?Does it matter that the prior owner is willing to waive his own first refusal right?How long should the objecting child be able to thwart the proposed sale or acquire the property for development?Twenty-five years?A lifetime?The lifetime of the last surviving family member plus twenty-one years?Longer?So came about Peters v. Smolian, 1 a dispute over a pristine site in the Town of East Hampton. 2 An article in the New York Times reports that the parties to the original transaction negotiated the right of first refusal to assure that the property, situated in a forested patch of Long Island's East End, could not be resold for development purposes.3 Local celebrities with ties to the area, including the actor Alec Baldwin, advocated publicly