Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

trees with fruit trees, mining on crop land, plastering bare walls, or even installing gutters. Note that this restriction is not technically negotiable; it is built into the definition of usu fruct (though, of course, an owner who really did not care what the holder of usufruct was doing to her property could simply choose not to take legal action to stop it.) Again, this limits the flexibility and thus the commercial value of usufruct, but makes reasonable sense if (as just suggested) usufruct is meant as temporary support for one person until the “real” owner takes over. Note also that if the nature of the property was dramatically altered by outside forces (say, if a house burned entirely to the ground), the usufruct came to an end. Usufruct gives its holder broad enough rights that we can think of it as near to ownership, but with a few defined limi tations. Servitudes, on the other hand, are very specific rights over a piece of property that in most respects remains under the control of the actual owner. Servitudes are “real” rights in the technical sense of being attached to things (Latin res ), not to people (compare the “real” contracts discussed in Chapter 12 or the English term “real estate”). More specifically, they were always built into a pair of adjacent pieces of real estate. When a servitude exists in one of these pairs, the person who happens to own one property (the “dominant” one) at any given time always has that right over the person who happens Servitudes

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