HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PROMISSORY SERVITUDES Sample Clauses

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PROMISSORY SERVITUDES. At English common law, agreements regarding land were only enforceable as real covenants. For a real covenant to bind subsequent owners of the properties in question, the parties to the original contract had to intend that it run, the contract needed to touch and concern the land, and there had to be privity both between the original parties (horizontal) and between those parties and the current residents or owners (vertical). Because horizontal privity was limited to landlord-tenant relationships and the dominant and servient tenements to an easement, relatively few of these restrictions were enforced. In other words, if a landlord wanted to bind people who took over his tenant’s leasehold, he could. If the dominant tenement holder wanted to enforce requirements related to his easement on all holders of the servient tenement, he could. But if a landowner wanted to divide his parcel and limit the activities of the purchaser of one portion of the lot, he could not make those limits binding on subsequent owners. Perhaps because there were lots of good reasons to allow the person dividing his parcel to create binding agreements, courts developed two ways to broaden the traditional limits on the enforceability of real covenants. First, in many jurisdictions in the United States, the definition of horizontal privity was expanded to include the grantor-grantee relationship. This allowed more contracts involving land to bind successors. Second, the English courts of equity invented the Equitable Servitude. This device allowed the courts to enforce these contracts in equity by granting injunctions where the parties to the original contract intended that it run, the contract touched and concerned the land, and the burdened party had notice of the restriction. The elimination of the privity requirements meant that not only could grantors create contracts that run with the land of their grantees, but for the first time neighbors whose property had no legal relationship could create contracts that ran with the land. The evolution of the modern subdivision in the US led to further development of these doctrines. As early as the middle of the 19th Century, American entrepreneurs were dividing up large parcels of land and selling the resulting smaller parcels for residential use. A humorous example of one of these early subdivisions is described in Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx’x novel, Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx. In any event, these subdivisions raised new issues. The law of real covenants an...