Made aware of a utility easement a year on Assume that around 1911 a utility sewer is laid down on private land with an easement that was limited “until a public sewer pipe be built”, with the document being properly filed. Such a construction never happens and the easement eventually is forgotten to be put on the title documents to the house on the register. Now, the house is sold without notice of that easement. It comes back up when the water company actually comes along a year after the sale to do some work on the pipe they have the easement to. However, a copy of the easement document can be located, dated and filed in some old drawer of some registry. Can this easement be revoked or is it forever?
While this question was initially posed as a request for legal advice, I've stated some general principles of this kind of situation generically. You are deemed to have &quot;constructive notice&quot; for legal purposes of all documents filed in the public record pertaining to your property whether you know it or not. You are also on notice of anything that a reasonably informed person could assume to exist from observable facts (like that existence of municipal water and sewer service) upon an inspection of the property. In terms of reasonable expectations, almost every urban home is subject to multiple utility easements. If your home has (or most homes in your neighborhood have) municipal water service, municipal sewer service, electrical service, and cable or telephone lines, there are almost certainly easement in place for all of these things. Typically, in a contract for the purchase of real estate, there is a fixed deadline for you (or a title company on your behalf) to review the public record to find what is there. If you don't object by that deadline to any title issues, you can't get out of the real estate contract or undo it. Typically, the deed from the seller will contain an exclusion from the warranty of title for &quot;all easement of record.&quot; If the title insurance policy contains an exclusion for easements, you can't make a claim against that title insurance policy. Even if there weren't an easement in the public real property records, anything that has been there since 1911 would benefit from a &quot;prescriptive easement&quot; which is the equivalent of adverse possession a.k.a. squatter's rights, for easements. In New Jersey, for example, the prescriptive easement time period is usually twenty years and never more than sixty years. Furthermore, utilities usually have the power, delegated to them by the government that grants them permission to operate or by the state, to create new easements at the very modest price associated with a reduction in fair market value caused by the easement. This is often estimated to be half of the fair market value of the unimproved land per square foot times the actual square footage occupied by the utility when it isn't working on its infrastructure. Easements, once established, run with the land, and generally can't be removed without the permission of the party for whose benefit the easement is granted a.k.a. the owner of the dominant estate (in legal terminology, the utility's rights in the easement are called the &quot;dominant estate&quot; and the home owner's rights in the property subject to the easement are called the &quot;servient estate&quot;). There may be implied in law duties of someone using an easement to restore damage caused after using it, but it wouldn't be worth suing over that for a bit of displaced grass and a rose bush.
It depends on what state this is. In Washington state, there is a form that sellers must fill out, and section 3 addresses sewer connections. This matter could have been disclosed – the allowed answers are &quot;yes; no; don't know&quot; (or NA). These are sellers disclosures, and Zillow / Redfin are free to be unreliable (I personally know that they are wrong about square footage). A real estate agent also doesn't become liable for being misinformed. Assuming your state has this or analogous question, &quot;No&quot; means that you were told (doesn't matter if you didn't notice it), and &quot;Don't know&quot; means you're gambling. Let's say that the answer was &quot;Yes&quot;. Still, you can't necessarily sue (and win): you would have to prove misrepresentation (fraud or negligence) and not innocent error. You could do this by, for instance, proving that seller had the septic tank cleaned out some years earlier. Perhaps an action against buyer's inspector is possible, since that's nominally what they might have been hired to find out. But that is only true if checking the sewer connection can reasonably be considered part of the deal, so you have to look at the contract with the inspector (and the inspector's report).
New Jersey is not a community property state, but it is an equitable distribution state. This means that in a divorce marital property is divided, not automatically 50-50, but in a way that seems financially fair to the supervising judge, or according to an agreement entered into by both spouses. This also means that the state considers a car bought during the course of the marriage "marital property". There are also special rules for property bought before May 28 1980, which do not seem to apply in the case in the question. However, "marital property" mostly applies when a marriage ends which the question says is not in view here. NJ does allow for a car to be titled to only one, or to both. A title with both names may read "John Doe OR Mary Doe" or "John Doe AND Mary Doe". In the AND case both spouses must sign to sell or borrow against the car, in the OR case either signature will do. If only one name is on the title, that person must sign to sell or borrow. If it comes down to a dispute, the person whose name is on the title can decide where it is to be garaged, and who has permission to drive it. If the "sporty" car is in the name of both parents, either could move it to some other location, and either could move it back. Going back and forth could easily get ugly. If both names are on the 'sporty' car's title with an OR, the husband could sell it without consulting the wife. if there is an AND he would need her to agree. If the older car is in the husband's name alone, he could deny the wife or the son the right to drive it. The wife could, of course, buy a different older (used) car and allow the son to use it. Obviously it would be a good idea if the husband and wife came to a voluntary agreement about all this, but no law requires them to do so.
No. Just because some building is "owned by the public" or State, doesn't mean it's public property. A state's national guard installation comes to mind immediately. State workers' offices are not public places. Airport hangars/buildings/runways. You can't just go hang out in the DPW garages.
There are some consequences for you, under the Seattle Residential Code. Per R103.5 Any person violating or failing to comply with the provisions of this code shall be subject to a cumulative civil penalty in an amount not to exceed $500 per day for each violation from the date the violation occurs or begins until compliance is achieved. $182,500 per year. Also under R103.4, Whenever any building or structure is being occupied contrary to the provisions of this code, the building official may order such occupancy discontinued and the building or structure, or portion thereof, vacated by notice. There should be a notation on your panel indicating permit number and approval, but if you have the permit number, you can check if the inspection was done and the work was approved (I think this will report status). The legal burden of assuring that the work was done correctly and paperwork is in order ultimately falls on the owner, though the city at least initially talks to the contractor. Insofar as a customer taking a picture doesn't count as an actual final inspection, I suspect that some cost- and time-saving short-cuts were taken. Following up on the new information about being a tenant, the primary legal question is whether you have a duty of care towards the landlord, since in engaging this company, the landlord's interest may be put at risk. The landlord may have protected his interest via a clause in the lease saying &quot;you must get written permission to modify the property, and you assume full liability for resulting damages&quot;, so first thing to check is what the lease says (perhaps look for a &quot;Tenant's duty of care&quot; clause). In lieu of clear evidence that you caused damage to the owner (economic damage, by negligence w.r.t. his need to have proper permits and the whopping fines that follow), I don't see what the risk to you would be in just washing your hands of the problem.
We have made a complaint about this decision to the local administrative and highest courts of Finland. Both of these courts rejected our complaint (the highest court rejected our right to even file a complaint!) without even looking into the details of the matter at hand. Did you hire a lawyer? If the court rejected your complaint without even considering it, it may have been procedurally improper. Generally speaking, once your complaint is rejected by a court with proper jurisdiction, the matter is resolved and you lost. End of story, too bad. You have no recourse but to accept the action of the local government as lawful even though you believe that your case was wrongfully decided. In any case, I doubt that the local government's action in your context is illegal. This is an issue of "condemnation" and not zoning. Generally speaking, the government has a power of eminent domain to seize property for a public use so long as a process is in place for the owner to obtain compensation for the seizure. A government owned recreation center would generally be considered a public use. Certainly, nothing you have described would violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, 2010/C 83/02, Article 17. As you note: No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss. This is a case where the deprivation is in the public interest, in which the Finnish courts have decided that the conditions provided by law for doing so have been met, and in which you acknowledge that you have a right to compensation. Since it appears that the compensation has not yet been determined, it is premature to say that the compensation you receive will not be fair or paid in good time, and you need to participate actively and vigorously in the compensation process to make sure that you do make the best case you can for fair compensation. Also, as you note, this has happened many times in Finland. This strongly support the conclusion that this action is legal under Finnish law, even if you would prefer to interpret its laws in another manner. Of course the compulsory purchase will not be paid with a fair market price but with a much lower price, which is technically a legalized robbery as it has many times occurred in similar cases in Finland. My next step is to file a complaint to the European Union Fundamental Rights commission in hopes that they can help me. An appeal to the European Union sounds futile to me, as everything you have said suggests that your rights under the E.U. Charter have not been violated. Call it robbery if you will from a moral perspective, but as you note, it is legalized robbery in much the same way that taxes are "legalized theft." Your efforts would be better sent hiring a lawyer to help you negotiate with the local government over the price. If you make a strong evidentiary case that the land is worth more than you have been offered, you have a decent chance of getting more than you have been offered, even if it is less than what you believe it is worth. You also have a better case of winning on appeal on the issue of an unfair price in a second instance court in Finland, than you would on the issue of whether the condemnation was legal, on which the settled law in Finland and under international law is that it generally is legal in your circumstances.
This is outside the scope of landlord-tenant law and the obligation of the landlord to make the premise habitable. Building codes are not imposed retroactively on existing housing, so while it is true that you cannot legally build a house without service grounding, you do not have to install service grounding when that becomes part of the electrical code (which was decades ago). The law is here; the state could have impose an obligation on landlords to always update plumbing, electrical etc. so that rental housing always conforms to current codes, but it did not. If the electric does not work properly, that has to be repaired, but if there is a functioning but less than ideal electric (knob and tube wiring; ungrounded; no GFI circuits in the bathroom, incorrect receptacle covers, overburdened or improperly placed service panel, too few receptacles), that's not something you can legally force a landlord to change.
In California (where lost+found laws have been discussed quite a lot), this would be either "lost property" or "abandoned property". With abandoned property, you can do what you want. With lost property, it is legal to ignore it. If you take it, you have the obligation to try to return it to the owner. If you don't do that, it's theft. If you don't take it, you have no obligation whatsoever. Put it somewhere where the loser (the person who lost it) is more likely to find it, for example on the street. Don't take anything. Clarification for comments: There is a box. And the owner of the box is nowhere to be seen. That box is by definition lost or abandoned - it is abandoned if the owner got rid of it intentionally, it is lost if the owner is looking for it. We don't know. We can make guesses depending on the situation. No matter whether lost or abandoned, you are legally absolutely fine if you just ignore it. You have no reason to try to return it to its owner. If you don't make it your business, it's not your business. But if you decide you want the box, or bits of it, and it isn't abandoned (which is hard to know for sure), then you have to try to find the owner first, and if you don't find them, then you can keep it.