Spatial divisions
All Western legal systems allow the owner of property to divide it along spatial lines. Such divisions may be unwise, for example, where the resulting piece of land has no access to a public right-of-way (see below Public regulation of land use). In the case of land, public regulation may prevent the division.
A somewhat different set of problems arises when the desired division is vertical rather than horizontal. By and large, Anglo-American law allows such vertical divisions, so that one person may own the mineral strata underneath land, another the surface of the land, and the third the air rights. The civil-law systems have had some difficulty with this type of division of ownership, because of the medieval maxim “Cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et usque ad inferos” (“Whoever owns the soil owns all the way to heaven and all the way to hell”). In both systems modern legislation has made possible, for example, ownership of an apartment on the 30th floor of a building. Condominium ownership is more complicated, because the condominium owner owns not only the area within the four walls of his apartment or house but also access rights and privileges to use common areas and utilities. Cooperative ownership avoids this complexity by having each of the cooperators own a share in a corporation. The corporation, in turn, allows the cooperators to possess their dwelling units, while retaining the title to all the property.
Temporal divisions
Anglo-American law is notorious for the number and complexity of temporal divisions of ownership it allows. The English law on the topic was considerably simplified in 1925, when it became impossible to have legal ownership divided temporally other than between landlord and tenant. English law, however, continues to allow complicated temporal divisions of beneficial interests in trusts, allowing, therefore, a temporal division in the equitable but not the legal ownership. In many of the remaining Anglo-American jurisdictions, temporal division of the legal ownership of land is still possible, although increasingly undertaken by way of trust.
One of the possible temporal divisions of ownership in Anglo-American law, the life estate and the remainder in fee, has already been considered. In such an arrangement the life tenant has the right to possess the land for his natural life. He may use the property, but he may not impair its capital value (commit waste). He may convey his interest, but he may convey no more than what he has, an interest limited by his life. Hence, his conveyee receives an estate limited by the life of the conveyor (estate pur autre vie). Common-law dower and curtesy are types of life estates.
The remainderman has a right to possession that commences upon the death of the life tenant. He may not use the land until the life tenant dies but may sue the life tenant if the life tenant commits waste. Since the remainderman’s interest is an interest in fee, his interest will pass to his heirs or devisees if he dies before the life tenant. The remainderman may also convey his interest inter vivos, subject to the life estate. If the original owner in fee conveys a life estate to someone else and retains the rest of the property in himself, the retained interest is called a reversion. For most purposes reversions have the same characteristics as remainders. A number of variations on the basic pattern of life estate and remainder are possible in Anglo-American law. There may, for example, be successive life estates: “to my wife, Edith, for her life, remainder to my son George for his life, remainder after George’s death to George’s children.”
Contingent interests
Not only is it possible to create successive interests in land in Anglo-American law, but it is also possible to create interests that are subject to express contingencies. Thus, in the example given above, the donor could make the remainder in George contingent upon George’s having attained a specific age, say 21, at the time of the death of the previous life tenant.
Not only is it possible to make future interests subject to contingencies, but it is also possible in most Anglo-American jurisdictions to make present interests in fee subject to contingencies. Thus, it is possible, for example, to grant a fee interest subject to the contingency that the land be used for school purposes and to provide for a forfeiture of the interest if it is not so used (fee simple determinable, fee simple subject to a condition subsequent).
Some, although not all, of the arrangements described above are possible in civil law. The major distinction between Anglo-American and civil law in this regard is that civil law normally does not regard such arrangements as involving divisions of ownership. Thus, the usufruct, the device in civil law that most closely corresponds to the life estate of the Anglo-American law, is regarded not as a form of ownership but as a right in the thing of another (jus in re aliena).
Although the usufructuary normally does not have the right to possession in civil law, he is normally given possessory remedies against third-party wrongdoers. All in all, one may question how different the practical position of the usufructuary is from that of the life tenant in Anglo-American law, despite the substantial conceptual differences between the two systems.
Even in the area of conditional gifts, the differences between the two systems are not as great as they might seem. True, in civil law the basic principle is that gifts cannot be conditioned. The donor must give outright or not at all. There are, however, exceptions in civil law that derive from the medieval Roman law of fideicommissary substitutions (the Roman fideicommission that permitted testators to avoid certain restrictions on legacies that existed under the formulary system of Roman law). The rules are complicated and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In the French system, for example, it is possible to make a will giving property to one’s children and requiring that they turn it over to their children. In German law, it is possible to appoint successive heirs, so long as the succession occurs within 30 years of the death of the testator.
There is no equivalent in the civil law of the fee simple with a forfeiture clause. Thus, a grant subject to the condition that the land be used for school purposes is not possible in civil law, although there are ways of achieving similar results in civil law, at least for limited periods of time.
In Anglo-American law present possessory interests less than the fee need not be limited to the life of the holder of the interest; they may also be limited to a specific term of years or to a renewable term. Such a transaction creates the relationship of landlord and tenant. The tenant may have a possessory interest for any specific term, such as 1 month, 1 year, 5 years, or 99 years. The tenant may also have an interest for a specific term that is renewed automatically unless the landlord or the tenant gives notice within a fixed period before the term expires (periodic tenancy). Thus, tenancies can be arranged, for example, from week to week, month to month, or year to year. It is also possible to have a tenancy for no fixed term but subject simply to the will of the landlord and tenant (tenancy at will). Either landlord or tenant may give notice to the other at any time to terminate the tenancy. (In many jurisdictions tenancies at will are subject to statutory regulation concerning the time of the notice to terminate, thus making them more like periodic tenancies.)
Similarly, civil law allows the creation of landlord-tenant relations. Although the categories of tenancies recognized in Anglo-American law do not exist in civil law, it is possible to create by private agreement most of the landlord-tenant arrangements that Anglo-American law recognizes. What is different in civil law is the conception of the relationship between landlord and tenant. In modern civil law, as in Roman law, the tenant does not have the right to possession; the landlord does. Since the landlord has a contractual obligation to allow the tenant to possess, the practical consequences of this conceptual distinction are not great. The most important area where the two systems differ is in the situation where the landlord sells his interest in the land to someone else. In Anglo-American law, the tenant has an enforceable possessory interest against his new landlord. In civil law, the tenant’s remedy is against his old landlord. Even this difference has been narrowed by recent legislation in civil-law jurisdictions that allows tenants to sue third parties who interfere with their possession in fact.
Throughout the West in the second half of the 20th century, there were substantial changes in the law governing landlord-tenant relationships. These changes most notably affected the law concerning residential tenancies, particularly tenancies in urban apartments. Some jurisdictions also made extensive changes in the law governing agricultural tenancies. By and large, the law of commercial tenancies was left to private agreement. Commercial leases, therefore, continue to use traditional forms, with the terms being negotiated between the parties.
In the United States the changes in residential landlord-tenant law were initiated by the courts. Legislation has followed, confirming and frequently going beyond what the courts have done. In the rest of the West, the initiative has been taken by the legislatures, although the end results have been quite similar.
In the United States changes in the law of landlord and tenant came in the 1960s and early ’70s, when the country came to focus on the deteriorated conditions of housing that existed for the urban poor, those who had been left behind as the middle class moved to newly constructed housing in the suburbs. Urban housing for the poor was frequently maintained at levels far below what was required by local regulation, but enforcement of these codes was sporadic. Faced with this situation and with considerable legislative inertia, American courts came to read the provisions of the housing code into the lease. Javins v. First Nat’l Realty Co. (1970), for example, requires that every residential lease have within it an unwaivable warranty of habitability, requiring the landlord to maintain the premises up to the standard of the local housing code. If the landlord does not maintain the premises up to this standard, the tenant may withhold rent, and the landlord cannot evict him for nonpayment of rent.
Legislation in the 1970s tended to confirm the results of Javins. Other legislation and decisions gave residential tenants more security of tenure. A number of urban jurisdictions that had abandoned rent control reinstated it. While there are still considerable differences between the American and European patterns of regulation of the residential landlord-tenant relationship, the trend is toward convergence. Everywhere the essential terms of the relationship are increasingly fixed by law; the tenant’s interest in his dwelling has become more secure, while the landlord is regarded less as an owner than as the provider of a public utility. Public sentiment has swung for and against rent control over the years.
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