The program at the 2025 annual meeting and conference of the Real Estate and Land Use section of the Oregon State Bar, known fondly to lawyers in the field as RELU, includes a presentation by Dean Alterman on landlocked parcels.  A parcel might be legally landlocked because, like the parcel in the illustration, it does not front on a public road and has no legal access to a public road.  It might be factually landlocked because even though it fronts on a public road, a river or chasm might cut most of the parcel off from the public road.  Or it might be legally but not factually landlocked: what if a private road runs through the parcel, but the owner of the parcel doesn’t have the legal right to use the road?  Dean’s presentation covers how lawyers can advise clients in any of these three unfortunate situations, interspersed with discussions of the rights and obligations of adjoining landowners, set off by quotations from Robert Frost.  Who has the right to use old private roads if, as Frost wrote in Mending Wall, “no one has seen them made or heard them made”?  Dean will answer that question, and others, on August 23 at RELU.

On June 14, Dean Alterman will present a Continuing Legal Education program tomorrow for the Solo and Small Firm Section of the Oregon State Bar on three types of easements: view easements, non-development easements (actually servitudes or covenants), and conservation easements.  These are the “You Can’t Do That!” easements.  Instead of giving the grantee permission to use the grantor’s property, the grantor is agreeing NOT to do something on the grantor’s property.   Do you want to protect your property’s view of Mount Hood?  Buy a view easement from the downhill neighbor.

Lawyers who draft view easements and non-development easements must produce agreements that satisfy their clients and are acceptable to the other party. Drafters of conservation easements must keep a third audience in mind: the Internal Revenue Service lists syndicated conservation easements among its Dirty Dozen tax scams.