Highest Md. Court to Hear Closely Watched Donor-Intent Case

The tangled history of the Johns Hopkins University’s legal dispute with the heirs of a Maryland woman over development of a rural property she sold to the institution for a pittance in the late 1980s is traced in a Washington Post magazine feature.

The fight has been closely watched by universities and philanthropists because it turns on claims by the family of the late Elizabeth Beall Banks that Hopkins is effectively flouting donor intent by developing the former farmstead far more densely than Ms. Banks intended when she sold it to the school for $5-million, about a tenth of its value at the time.

The university contends its plan for a 4.7-million-square-foot “science city” research campus does not breach the terms of the 1989 purchase contract, which stipulated that the property be used for agricultural, academic, research, or health-care services. Lower courts have sided with Hopkins. The Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, is slated to take up the case in the next few weeks.