What is a &quot;Right of a seat in church&quot; Easement attached to land I was casually reviewing property statutes for Oklahoma, as one is wont to do, when I came upon: 60 OK Stat s60-49: The following land burdens or servitudes upon land, may be attached to other land as incidents or appurtenances, and are then called easements: ... The right of a seat in church How can &quot;The right of a seat in church&quot; burden a land as an easement? What does a &quot;right of a seat in church&quot; easement even mean?
It means what it says The person who owns the land has a right to a seat in the parish church and, if there are not enough seats then they get one and other people have to stand. This is all pretty archaic but it stems from English law where parishes were geo-political and not just religious. Who got to sit was decided by the church-wardens and parishioners had a right to a seat without payment - visitors could be charged. However, some parishioners had an additional right by virtue of their office or landholding to a seat before other parishioners. The United States is in some ways a legal “time capsule”. Many common law countries have progressively codified the common law which tends to “fossilise” the law since judges are no longer able to say “well, that was a sensible law then but it’s clearly outdated so I’m changing it”. Since the United States did this earlier and harder than most other jurisdictions and has a natural progression back in time from the west to the east you get these lovely little anachronisms.
This is covered by Sections 1 to 6 of the Theft Act 1968. A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it. Each relevant word is then dealt with. Dishonestly does not apply in the circumstance where you have in law the right to deprive the other of it. Here, you have no right: the fruit's owner has every right to the fruit he owns. You have no right just to come along and take it. A right to deprive the other of something would be relevant where he had misappropriated it from you. Appropriation is any assumption by a person of the rights of an owner. Here, you are assuming the rights of the owner by taking the fruit. Property is fairly self-explanatory. Everything except land is property. Belonging to another: &quot;Property shall be regarded as belonging to any person having possession or control of it, or having in it any proprietary right or interest.&quot; Here, the owner of the tree has possession and control and a proprietary right and interest. Permanently depriving means that you treat the thing [fruit in this case] as your own to dispose of regardless of the other’s rights. All of these apply in your case of taking fruit from a tree owned and grown by someone else. There is an exception, which may be relevant to the &quot;by hook or by crook&quot; quote: A person who picks mushrooms growing wild on any land, or who picks flowers, fruit or foliage from a plant growing wild on any land, does not (although not in possession of the land) steal what he picks, unless he does it for reward or for sale or other commercial purpose. But this doesn't apply where the tree is not growing wild. It is generally held that you can cut off foliage or whatever which is overhanging your land — I can't find a reference specifically, but I expect it's to do with nuisance and free enjoyment of your own land — but the severed parts and any fruit on them are still the property of their owner, and you can't deprive him of them permanently. Public land isn't yours, so you can't cut off branches overhanging it: the public authority can. Even there, they must give them back to the owner. The 1968 Act repeals a number of prior Acts (all the way back to the First Statute of Westminster in 1265), but I can't see anything relevant to the restriction of common law. If what you quote as common law still applied in 1968, it was that Act which restricted it to wild fruit (as opposed to fruit overhanging public land). It's quite likely that the common law was simply codified and made unambiguous than it was deliberately restricted.
I presume that the document refers to "barn" and "barnebarn". Norway has forced heirship laws, which refers to offspring as "barn", not limited to those under the age of majority. Interpreted in the context of Norwegian law, there is no assertion in using the word that it grants a right to minors. When you add the additional condition that the recipient must have reached the age of majority, there is no conflict. In this kolonihage bylaws document, which is probably similar to the one you are looking at, §11.2.1 requires that a tranferee fulfill the criteria required for the allocation of parcels, and §11.2.2 addresses the non-necessity of paying the transfer fee in the case of death of the member, and does not create a special inheritance right. It also says that the new contract must be established. But a minor cannot establish a contract, and in general cannot be forced to fulfill the obligations of a member as spelled out in §9. You should check with a lawyer to be certain, of course.
(d) a place to which the public have access, whether as of right or not Be that broad or not, it applies to airport car parks. Would I be wasting my time trying to argue this in court? Pretty much.
The First Amendment is never interpreted as a complete prohibition against laws that could affect a religion, nor is it interpreted to mean that you can say or write anything whatsoever that you want. You cannot sacrifice humans when in the name of a religion, and you cannot sacrifice (murder) humans for fun. One part of the First Amendment regarding religion is the Free Exercise clause which says that you cannot prohibit the exercise of a religion, and another, the Establishment Clause, prohibits favoring a religion, or favoring religion over atheism. The clauses about free speech also do not mean that you can commit fraud and you cannot threaten people's lives. What decides how far the government can go is &quot;strict scrutiny&quot;, a doctrine that limits the extent to which the government can infringe on fundamental rights – First Amendment rights are the canonical example of a fundamental right. The main hurdle that a law so scrutinized has to pass is that the law is necessary for a compelling government interest. Preventing massive deaths is generally seen as such an interest. Then, the law has to be narrowly tailored to affect &quot;just those cases&quot;, and it has to be the lest restrictive means of accomplishing that end. Although the prevention of massive deaths is a compelling government interest, a government might screw this up in their legal arguments, as they seem to have done in Capitol Hill Baptist Church v. Bowser, where mass political protests were allowed but smaller religious meetings were prohibited. The government essentially &quot;waived&quot; that compelling interest, replacing it with an interest in preventing church meetings, which is plainly a violation of the First Amendment – they substantially burdened religious practices.
There's nothing that makes it illegal to ask others to give you money to donate to a third party. But if you want to say you're fundraising on behalf of another organization, obviously you need its permission. And if you want contributions to be considered charitable for tax purposes, and you want to make sure you don't wind up paying taxes on contributions "sent to" you but then passed on, then you may need to start worrying about a separate entity. It would be more straightforward to offer to create, host and administer the website for the church, with it receiving the contributions directly.
It would be unconstitutional for there to be a law against (public) schools having a field trip to a church or other religiously-centered building. The First Amendment requires government action to be neutral with respect to religion. This means that a public school can neither promote nor condemn religion. A field trip where the venue was a church is not per se the promotion of religion in general or a particular religion. A pattern of activity, and associated facts, could, however, establish that a seemingly innocent event is in fact religious proselytizing. If for example the teacher actually says "I want to make churches be a happy experience, so that students would be inclined to convert", that would cross the line from neutrality to advocacy. If there were many possible venues for such field trips and yet only the church is chosen, that might be evidence of non-neutrality. It really depends on the totality of facts. If the church has the only stage in town, that would be a perfectly reasonable basis for repeated trips to that church.
Is the soil a fixture or a chattel? Fixtures revert to the landlord; chattels remain the property of the tenant with the landlord as bailee. Soil could be either - if it was brought onto the site with the intention that it become a permanent part of the landscaping then its a fixture; if its purpose was to be on-sold or incorporated into pot-plants then its a chattel.