When is a place &#39;generally accessible&#39; In local regulation at a place I wish to wildcamp there is something like this (translated): 1) Within the city limits of Werfen, Austria it is not allowed to place tents, trailers. mobile homes etc. for the purpose of sleeping over night in public (generally accessible) places. This does not apply to licensed camp sites But now my question is, how is 'generally accessible' defined by law? How could I interpret this? I thought I could reason a contrario and say that I'm allowed to place camping gear in places not generally accessible (from roads or trails). Is this a valid argument?
Firstly, yours is not a valid argument. What is meant by "generally accessible" is public places like plazas, stretches of green by the road, parks, parking lots, etc. The definition is kind of a negative and could be more easily phrased as: "You may camp at A) designated camping areas or B) private places where you are entitled to camp". This means you either have to find a camping area where you pay a fee for a period of time, or you may camp on private grounds that either belong to you, or you have been given explicit permission to camp, say in a private garden or field. Of course this is practically impossible if you don't know anyone in there. But, the screenshot explicitly restricts this rule with the leading prase "Im Gemeindegebiet" which means if you leave the legal boundaries of Werfen, Salzburg county law applies (Which may or may not be similar). Disclaimer: While I don't have legal background, I can tell from personal experience that local governments are touchy on this and striking up camp somewhere where you are not allowed to will at least (if detected) require you to leave the premises immediately and the police may charge you with trespassing.
Can you be trespassing on public property for no reason at all? Yes. When the government owns property, it can direct you to leave for any reason (even a legally invalid reason), and you are trespassing if you don't leave. When you are present on land you don't own with permission, but without a lease, you have a &quot;license&quot; to be there which is a contract-like right and is not a property right. A license doesn't give you the right to stay on the property over the objections of the owner or an agent of the owner. You might be able to receive money damages for an improper termination of your license to be present at the property (e.g. if you are told for no reason to leave a movie after paying for a ticket), but you don't have the right to simply stay there. If you stay there over the objections of the owner or the owner's agent, you are trespassing. The law applicable to government property owners and private property owners is basically the same in this regard. Realistically, on government property, furthermore, the standard by which the government employee may legally terminate your license to be there and exclude you from the property is low. Basically, it must merely not violate any constitutional right you may have, and you do not have a constitutional right to be present on government owned property, except in a quite narrow subset of cases (e.g. the &quot;town square&quot;). More exactly, you do not have a right to be on government property per se, but you can't be excluded from it for a constitutionally impermissible reason. The government gets to decide what parts of property it owns are available to the general public and for what content-neutral purposes. Thus, the right to be present on government owned &quot;public&quot; property (which doesn't include private areas of government owned property) can be subjected to reasonable and content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. For example, a town could legally decide that the town square is closed from midnight to eight a.m. every day. The quoted material from the case Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41, 53-54 (1999) cited in the answer by bdb484 is narrower than a plain reading out of context would suggest. In that quotation, the term &quot;public place&quot; is being used in a sense much more restrictive than in the broader sense of property that is merely government owned. It is referring to places where the government has expressly or implicitly allowed members of the general public to be present on land that it owns (as opposed, for example, to a government office area of a building, or a maintenance facility in a government owned park, or a conservation area in a government owned park). This narrow sense of the word resolves what would otherwise seem to be a contradiction in the law. But, the government has the authority to make something that once was a public place into a non-public place going forward. For example, historically, the Civic Center park in front of the capitol in Denver, Colorado has been a public place. But, the government can and did close it off to the public for many months for maintenance and out of public health concerns when heavy use of it by homeless people and drug dealers caused the premises to be seriously damaged and created a public health risk from it being used to dispose of dirty, used, injection-drug syringes, and for people to defecate. A Hypothetical Suppose that Chris is the sole librarian in one of the towns of College Corner, which is on the Ohio-Indiana border, which are in different time zones. In that capacity, Chris has the authority to set library policies including the hours of the library and the rules for its use without the approval of anyone else. Chris has a hot date at 5:30 p.m. But, at lunch time, Chris learned that the hot date was at 5:30 p.m. in Ohio and not an hour later at 5:30 p.m. in Indiana, but the library's official closing time is 5 p.m. in Indiana, because Ohio was observing daylight savings time, but Indian was not, at the time when this happened. Chris, as the sole government official in charge of the library, decides to close the library before its posted closing time at 4:00 p.m. Indiana time (5 p.m. Ohio time) in order to be able to make it to the hot date. Chris quietly asks everyone left in the library to leave at 4 p.m. Indiana time, and everyone but you does. But you, who are homeless, really want to stay the extra hour before getting out in the cold and finding a bridge to sleep under, so you refuse to leave saying that the library is still open until 5 p.m. Indiana time, as stated in its posted hours. Chris orders you to leave and warns you that he is calling the police to remove you if you don't do so voluntarily. The police arrive and restate the complaint of Chris. The police arrest you for trespassing and you are charged with this crime in the appropriate court by the appropriate prosecuting attorney. You had done nothing wrong whatsoever prior to being asked to leave and refusing to do so. But, Chris has not violated your constitutional rights by ordering you removed for some unconstitutional reason. Chris then goes on the hot date; it is love at first sight, and Chris gets married the next week. As an apology for putting you out for the sole convenience of Chris, Chris invites you to the wedding. Do you have a valid defense to the criminal trespassing charge on the grounds that the librarian's actions were unconstitutional? No. You might have a &quot;good faith claim of right&quot; defense, however, to the criminal charges. Do you have a valid claim for money damages for a violation of your constitutional rights? No. Indeed, ordering you removed for &quot;no reason&quot; that has anything to do with your conduct, as in this case, is probably more likely to be legal and constitutional, than having you removed for &quot;some reason&quot; other than just &quot;because I the librarian say so&quot; that doesn't involve wrongdoing on your part. A Variation In The Hypothetical If instead, your were being ordered to leave the library because you were wearing an National Rifle Association cap (and the library didn't prohibit wearing caps), this affirmative reason, which is contrary to the First Amendment freedom of expression, would be a violation of your constitutional rights, which would definitely be a basis for a civil lawsuit against the librarian and police involved in you being arrested. I don't know the details of constitutional defenses in criminal law well enough to know if the violation of your constitutional rights would be a valid defense to the criminal trespassing charge (or a failure to obey a police officer's order to leave charge) resulting from you failing to leave in that circumstance, and I can see legitimate arguments both ways. This is also a situation where the non-constitutional claim of right defense to a trespassing charge would be a strong one.
Because the ordinance does not say &quot;and from each entrance&quot;, it cannot be interpreted to mean that the signs must both be visible and readable anywhere in the area as well as being visible and readable from the entrance. The use of distinct prepositions in the conjuncts means that the notice requirement can be satisfied by different signs: it's not that a sign has to have both properties.
What laws and precedent are applicable for willful trespass or similar actions in Germany? It will depend on Bobbi's intentions and justification for not leaving. Trespass is defined by § 123 StGB (non-binding translation on the official site) as: (1) Whoever unlawfully enters the private premises, business premises or other enclosed property of another, or closed premises designated for public service or transportation, or whoever stays there without being authorised to do so and does not leave when requested to do so by the authorised person incurs a penalty of imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year or a fine. (2) The offence is prosecuted only upon request. The case law for § 123 StGB includes this AG Haldensleben judgement on the objective justification of trespass: A trespassing can be justified by an emergency situation if environmental activists break into an animal breeding facility in order to document violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Also, as referred to in the comments, § 124 StGB increases the maximum sentence to two years if the unlawful trespass was aggravated by being carried out by &quot;crowd&quot;
Portable signs are legal and you have to obey then. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/27/section/65 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/482498/2-11.pdf
Let me give you a simple, even if rather silly example: You take me to a civil court. You tell the judge "gnasher regularly parks his blue car in front of my home, and the color blue violates my sense of beauty. Judge, make him stop it. " A question of fact would be: Is my car actually blue? Not green, or red? And do I actually park my car in front of your home, and do so regularly? A question of law would be: Am I allowed by law to park my car in front of your home, even when my car has a color that you don't like? If this goes to a civil court, the judge would look at it and probably say: "Even if all the facts that 'Gimme the 401' claimed are true, as a matter of law there would be no case for gnasher to answer, since these actions would be permitted by law". If the judge decided that it is illegal to park cars in offensive colours in front of someone else's home as a matter of law, the court would then have to decide the facts: Whether what you claimed is actually the truth. (And while this example is silly, there have been people claiming that the neighbour's use of WiFi interfered with their health. And by law it is illegal to interfere with someone's health, so the facts would have to be examined).
Farmer's Market is private property, which means that the owner gets to set the rule according to which you are allowed to enter and remain on their property. There is no fundamental right to be in a business, either under the US Constitution or California's. While you have a constitutional right to put a soapbox on the public sidewalk and denounce or extol whatever you like, there is no such right on another person's property. You also have a right to express racially and sexually abhorrent content on the street. Your right to express your viewpoint ends at the store's doors. The manager has a property right to withdraw the implicit permission to enter and remain that is implicit in running a publicly accessible store. Your constitutional right to say whatever you want has to do with government action,not private action. You have no right to compel individuals to listen to your viewpoint on private property. It is a business decision, well within the rights of the property owner, for him to find your conduct unacceptable and grounds for expulsion. You do have a recourse: shop somewhere that doesn't care what you say to their customers.
Can a restrictive covenant deny a land owner the right to use a road on their own property? Yes. A restrictive covenant could impose such a limitation, although usually a court would disfavor that interpretation of a covenant unless no other reasonable interpretation is possible from the language of the covenant. This is basically because it would be lawful (at common law anyway) to convey the land in its entirety to the covenant beneficiary, so it is lawful to convey a lesser interest to that person. It isn't inherently unconscionable unless it makes the property subject to the covenant landlocked with no access to a public road, in which case some mandatory doctrines regarding a right of access would probably apply. Often this would be done to create a private drive across the &quot;front lot&quot; (which has direct access to a public road by other means) when the &quot;back lot&quot; of a parcel was conveyed by the owner of the combined lot to the new owner of the back lot. A covenant might be chosen instead of an outright conveyance of the dogleg of road because it retains mineral rights in the servient estate owner, because it clearly allocates property tax payment duties to the underlying owner as part of a larger economic deal, and/or because it could make a transaction possible that would otherwise be prohibited by subdivision requirements applicable in that locality. The restriction might also reduce the servient estate owner's liability for accidents arising from use of the covenant access easement, since it would ordinarily vest all maintenance and use regulation in the dominant estate owner. Some other common easements that deny the servient estate owner all use of land for a period of time are easements to allow staging of road construction activities, and easements incident to mineral rights in states where destruction of the surface is allowed if it is later restored when the minerals are extracted (such as Wyoming).