Nuisance, Zoning and Land Use Regulation: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
25 flashcard terms for Property Topic 7, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 15-question quiz — free, no account needed.
A nontrespassory invasion of another person's interest in the private use and enjoyment of land, actionable only when the interference is both substantial and unreasonable, and when the defendant's conduct is intentional and unreasonable or otherwise negligent, reckless, or abnormally dangerous.
Substantial Interference
The threshold element of private nuisance, measured by what a normal person in the community would find seriously annoying rather than by the hypersensitive reaction of the particular plaintiff or the delicate needs of an unusually sensitive use of land.
Gravity Versus Utility Balance
The classic unreasonableness test, drawn from the Restatement Second of Torts section 826, weighing the gravity of the harm to the plaintiff against the social utility of the defendant's conduct, considering suitability to the locality, avoidability, and the character of the neighborhood.
Serious Harm Test
The alternative branch of unreasonableness allowing liability even for highly useful conduct when the harm is serious and the defendant could pay compensation for that harm and similar harms without being forced out of business.
Public Nuisance
An unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public, such as public health, safety, peace, or the free use of a highway, ordinarily abated by a public official rather than by an individual landowner.
Special Injury Requirement
The rule that a private plaintiff may sue on a public nuisance theory only by showing harm different in kind, not merely in degree, from that suffered by the public at large, which prevents duplicative suits by every affected citizen.
Coming to the Nuisance
The defense that the plaintiff moved into an area where the challenged activity was already operating; today it is only one factor bearing on reasonableness and equities rather than an absolute bar to relief.
Boomer v. Atlantic Cement
New York decision refusing to enjoin a large cement plant whose dust harmed neighbors and instead awarding permanent damages for the servitude imposed on the neighboring land, trading an injunction for a one-time compensation payment.
Spur Industries v. Del E. Webb
Arizona case enjoining a cattle feedlot on the suit of a developer whose retirement community had grown out to it, but conditioning the injunction on the developer indemnifying the feedlot for the cost of moving or shutting down.
Estancias Dallas v. Schultz
Texas case affirming an injunction against a noisy apartment air conditioning system after balancing the equities, holding that the modest cost of a quieter system did not outweigh the serious loss of the neighbors' use and enjoyment.
Fontainebleau Hotel Rule
The traditional view, from the Florida case involving a hotel addition that shaded a neighboring pool, that a landowner has no legal right to the free flow of light and air across adjoining land absent an easement or a purely malicious structure.
Prah v. Maretti
Wisconsin decision permitting a private nuisance claim when a neighbor's proposed house would block a solar collector, treating access to sunlight for energy as an interest that modern nuisance law can protect through the reasonableness balance.
Spite Fence
A structure erected with no legitimate purpose except to injure a neighbor by blocking light, air, or view; most states allow injunction or damages either by statute or under a malice based nuisance theory.
Lateral Support
The right of land in its natural condition to support from adjoining land; an excavator is strictly liable for withdrawing that support and causing subsidence, but is liable for damage to buildings only on proof of negligence in most states.
Riparian Rights
The eastern water allocation system giving owners of land touching a watercourse a shared right to reasonable use of the water, with correlative rights adjusted among users rather than fixed priorities based on time.
Prior Appropriation
The western water allocation system awarding rights by first beneficial diversion of water regardless of land ownership, so that senior appropriators take their full amount before junior users receive anything in a shortage.
Reasonable Use Rule for Groundwater
The prevailing modern approach limiting an overlying owner's pumping to uses reasonable in relation to the owner's own land, displacing the older absolute ownership rule that permitted unlimited withdrawal regardless of harm to neighbors.
Standard State Zoning Enabling Act
The model legislation circulated by the Commerce Department in the 1920s that most states copied; because zoning power is delegated by such acts, a local ordinance exceeding the enabling grant is ultra vires and invalid.
Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty
The 1926 Supreme Court decision upholding comprehensive use zoning as a facially valid exercise of the police power, leaving open case by case challenges to the application of an ordinance to a particular parcel.
Nonconforming Use
A use lawfully existing before an ordinance made it improper, which may generally continue but cannot be expanded, substantially changed, rebuilt after destruction, or resumed after abandonment.
Amortization
A zoning technique that phases out a nonconforming use after a grace period keyed to the owner's recoupment of investment; most courts uphold reasonable periods, while a few states treat forced termination as a compensable taking of property.
Use Variance
Permission to devote land to a use the district forbids, granted only on a strong showing of unnecessary hardship: no reasonable return from any permitted use, hardship unique to the parcel, no self-creation, and no harm to the neighborhood.
Special Exception
A use the ordinance itself contemplates in a district subject to conditions, also called a conditional use, which the board must approve when the applicant meets the stated standards rather than as a matter of pure discretion.
Spot Zoning
Invalid rezoning of a small parcel for the benefit of its owner in a way inconsistent with the surrounding district and the comprehensive plan, judged by parcel size, the benefit conferred, and any public purpose served.
Mount Laurel Doctrine
The New Jersey rule that developing municipalities must use their zoning power to provide a realistic opportunity for a fair share of the regional need for low and moderate income housing, with builder remedies enforcing the duty.