Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

(which he could revoke), and that would block formation of the servitude [23f, i] . Unlike usufruct, servitudes could in principle last forever, and in theory it was not possible to create one with a built-in time limit. The owner of a dominant property could renounce it by appropriate ritual, and that would eliminate the relation ship between the two properties from that point forward. The servitude would also automatically disappear if both properties came to be owned by the same person (you can’t have a right against yourself), even if they were later divided again. Most distinctive to servitude is loss by disuse, the flip side of acqui sition by assertion. There were two versions of this process. So-called positive servitudes involved the right to use the other person’s property directly (e.g., passage, drawing water). These were lost by simple nonuse for a specified length of time (a year or two). Written notices might serve to reinforce the existence of such rights [23a, c, m] . “Negative” servitudes, on the other hand, involved the right to stop the other person from certain uses of their property (e.g., discharging smoke, blocking light). These counted as “unused” only as long as that other person was actually taking potentially forbidden action (e.g., has actu ally built a house that blocks your light). Since asserting and denying rights was important to keeping them, it was common to post notices asserting your rights (or denying others’), and many of these have survived, inscribed on stone (see [24] ). This general idea of loss by disuse is also paralleled in the mod ern law of easement. (Some universities where I have worked have similar notices written on metal plaques embedded in the

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