Category: Real Estate

Erica Menze presents at RELU

On August 16, Erica Menze presented a session on basic principles of real estate law for land use lawyers to the annual meeting of the Real Estate and Land Use Section of the Oregon State Bar.  It was entitled “Don’t Zone Out When Your Client’s In Seizin.” (A simultaneous presentation in the next room covered basic principles of land use law for real estate lawyers.)

Oregon has many outstanding real estate lawyers and many fine land use practitioners.  Only a few lawyers regularly practice where the two fields overlap.  If you have a real estate situation with quirky land use issues, or a land use problem with an unusual real estate twist, perhaps we can help.

75 years of trespassing will not a prescriptive easement make, says the court of appeals

The legal doctrine of adverse possession generates a lot of legal folklore.  If you fence in your neighbor’s property for X years, does it become yours?  In some states, yes; in others, no.  In Oregon the answer is “it depends.”

The kissing cousin of adverse possession is the prescriptive easement.  If you use your neighbor’s property for a driveway for X years without permission, do you acquire a permanent easement to continue to use it?  In some states, yes; in others, no.  In Oregon the answer is — you guessed it — “it depends.”  One of the facts on which the answer depends is whether your use was adverse enough for the neighbor to notice that you were trespassing.  If your use wasn’t so obvious that your neighbor must have noticed, then your use isn’t adverse enough to ripen into a prescriptive easement.  The Oregon court of appeals said this month that if your neighbor is a railroad, it might not be expected to notice that you’re trespassing, even if you’ve been trespassing for 75 years.  Read Dean Alterman’s article about the case on LinkedIn here.

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