Groundbreaking Property Law Cases

Property law is built not only on the statutes and regulations that are enshrined in law and often voted on in the House of Commons but also are built on the precedents and decisions made on property cases in the past that commercial property solicitors study when looking into cases. 

 

Many of these cases are not only fascinating but continue to resonate even decades after their decision has been rendered. Here are some of the most groundbreaking cases concerning property law. 

One of the biggest principles of property law, and something that makes surveying and land registry searches essential, is the “ad coelum” doctrine, which is derived from a much longer Latin phrase that states that property owners own the plot of land as well as everything above and below it. 

 

However, in practice, you do not own the core of the earth nor do your own the airspace above your house, and the case that established it concerned former chairman of Granada Television Sidney Bernstein and the aerial photography company Skyviews & General. 

 

Skyviews took aerial pictures and sold them to the homeowners, but Mr Bernstein argued that this was trespassing due to flying over his airspace. This established the “ordinary use principle”, establishing that a landowner only owns land up to a height needed to enjoy it. 

There are several cases, particularly in the financial world, of people trying to obfuscate the true nature of an agreement by naming it something else, and the biggest example of this in property law is the case of Street v Mountford in 1985. 

 

This established that, despite signing an agreement that was described as a license rather than a lease, the existence of exclusive possession of the rooms suggested that the agreement was in fact a lease, providing extra legal protections to Mrs Mountford.