Easements Flashcards
When is an easement capable of being a legal interest?
Duration is equivalent to one of the two legal estates
What is an easement?
Proprietary right to use land belonging to someone else
What are positive and negative easements?
Positive – allows holder to use servient land in a particular way
Negative – right enjoyed from the holder’s land
What are grants and reservations?
Grant: Landowner sells/leases part of land and gives buyer/tenant easement over retained land.
Reservation: Landowner sells/leases part and retains right over that land
How may easements arise?
- express
- implied
- prescription
What type of easement is an easement that has arisen by prescription?
Legal easement
What are the requirements for prescription?
- exercised reasonably regularly
- Used without force
- Used without secrecy
- Used without permission
- Uninterrupted use for 20 year period
What does interruption mean in the context of prescription?
No use for 1 year or more
Can a tenant obtain a prescriptive easement?
No must be between two freeholders
How do you determine whether a right is an easement or just a licence?
- Ellenborough park test
- No disqualifying factors
- Acquired as an easement
What is the Ellenborough park test?
- Must be dominant and servient tenement
- Right must accommodate the dominant tenement
- Must be diversity of ownership
- Right must ‘lie in grant’
What does ‘the right must lie in grant’ mean?
- Granted by a capable grantor to a capable grantee
- Capable of reasonably exact description
- Judicially recognisable
What are the disqualifying factors for an easement?
- no exclusive possession
- no additional expenditure
- no permission
What is the key principle for exclusive possession and how should it be applied?
Ouster principle
If servient owner able to anything with land except interfere with rights, likely not disqulaified
What are the ways in which a right can be acquired as an easement?
- Complies with statutory formalities for express grant/reservation
- Recognised method of implied acquisition
- Prescription
If an easement is not forever or a set period of time, what can it only be?
Equitable interest