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View Full Version : What is Imposition acquisition and transfer of easements?



vustudents
04-30-2012, 09:41 PM
Distinction between easements and natural rights: In considering the acquisition of easements, the material effect of the distinction between easements and natural rights is to be noticed. Easements can only be created and conferred by the act of man, whereas natural rights are incident to land, and to them the owner of land as much right as he has to the land itself, without the direct intervention of human agency- - that is, without any act of creation and gift by the servient owner, and without any act of acquisition on the part of the dominant owner. Easements are restrictions on natural rights.
As a matter of fact, the act by which particular easements are created and acquired in many cases never really takes place, but is merely implied; it will be seen, however, that an act of creation is never implied unless there is some reason arising from the action of the parties, or from surrounding circumstances, why such an act should be implied, and why it should be supposed that the act really occurred, although no evidence of its occurrence actually exists, and although perhaps everybody knows fully well that it never did take place. The theory of the law is that easements are always created by grant, but a grant of the right will often be implied when no trace of the making of such a grant can actually be shown; while, on the other hand, no grant can be implied, unless such an implication is rendered reasonable by surrounding circumstances, or the acts of the parties. At first sight it may appear unreasonable and absurd that the law should permit such important rights as easements, which operate so detrimentally against the servient estate, to rest on no sounder base than agent which is implied or an act which is implied or an act which is presumed, but in practice it has been found necessary for the quieting of titles and prevention of strite, as well as for the maintenance of valuable interests which must otherwise cease, to stamp usages as rights which have been nothing but encroachments and a succession to trespass. The implication or presumption of grants if one of those fictions of the law to which the wisdom of our ancestors gave birth when pressed with the difficulty of accounting for usages which were claimed “as of rights”, but which they knew fully well had always been wrong, and the value of the fiction has proved so great that it has withstood the ravages of time and almost the reforming hand of the Legislature.