In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability
Not if you brought the land since 2013: If the church hasn't registered the chancel repair liability in the land's title register, there's no liability. And very few churches registered, judging it a pretty big middle finger to your congregation.
Of course, there are plenty of scammers happy to charge you £50 for insurance against an impossibility...
Yeah there are a lot of very obscure legal rules that most people aren't aware of or haven't been enforced in many years.
Not from as far back but my house was built in the early 1980's and my house deeds include the stipulation that I must maintain a garage attached to the property (so I can't convert it to extra living space) because the local government retain the right to convert the space into a decontamination shelter in the event of chemical, biological or nuclear attack. Had a good chuckle with my lawyer regarding it, don't think I'll be too concerned about where to keep my lawn mower if the city has been nuked.
Years ago, I was doing some C++ training for Texas Instruments in Bedford, England. I remarked to the woman running the course how brutalistically ugly their building was. She said it was to prevent damage from earthquakes. Bedford is not exactly famous for these events, and she explained that TI simply had one (possibly quake proof) building designed, and then built the same one all over the world. She may have been pulling my leg, of course.
Interesting. I live near the TI HQ in Dallas, so I thought I'd take a peek. The Bedford location apparently still exists as "Bedford Heights," and it does look like a mini TI. The Bedford Heights website does call out the "cyclone-proof roof," which they imported directly from the Dallas HQ blueprints.
Ah, thinking back (it was a loooong time ago, and I was only on-site for five days) I think she may have mentioned typhoons.
The thing that really struck me at the time was not so much the building, but the security. There were card-access only doors every few yards, and they wouldn't give me even a visitor card - I had to be escorted to the lav and canteen all the time, which was irritating for all concerned. God knows what they were up to in there - summoning dread Cthulhu?
I did a two week contract for a defense research institute once where a senior staff developer had to babysit me like that. He was nice about it, but it must have been really annoying. It was simply easier for them than going through the bureaucracy of getting me a visitor pass for a contract that short.
The wild thing is we still have thousands of nuclear weapons, and the number of nuclear-armed states has grown since then. We just perceive a lower risk now-a-days, which I hope holds up.
Even without going archaic, I had to take insurance when I bought a terrace, because a lease existed on the land at some point but the owning company had dissolved years prior and no lease had been paid for a long time. This is very common in a country (UK) where the State has had strong continuity for several centuries, so land rights and entitlements can be tracked very far back.
In the US there is adverse possession, so if someone openly claims the land (living, using, maintaining, etc) for many years (10-20?), they can end up owning the land.
It helps settle minor arguments between property lines where fences existed for 50 years but the true line was not on the fence line.
These things really are to extract money and commissions during the property purchase. In most cases there is no issue at all but no-one is going to question paying a few pounds extra on a property purchase "for peace of mind".
When the likelihood of the risk is small, but the potential damage bill could be financially catastrophic, I think it's perfectly rational to buy insurance if the premium is so low.
Sure. My point is that often the risk is not small, it's non-existent.
When I bought my current house my solicitor suggested that the seller should pay for insurance cover for the fact that there was no planning paperwork for a small side extension. Of course I said OK and of course the seller also agreed. But that extension was even shown on the land registry plan and was obviously 20+ years old. Since planning breach action is limited to 4 years there was no chance of any problem. Free money for insurer, commissions, etc.
So I've done the same when I bought my last house(conservatory built 20 years ago, seller couldn't produce the correct paperwork for it), but the issue wasn't the planning permissions per se, it was that the original builder of the house(Belway) hasn't given permission and they reserve the right to do so for 99 years after construction(even though the house is a freehold now, the entire estate is still Belway's leasehold). So the insurance was against that as well.
Like, are the chances of Belway complaining and landing us in legal trouble close to zero? Yes, they are, but like said above - it was £50 and I got the seller to pay for it. When we sell the house I'll do the same just to avoid any bumps in the process because of it.
Hence why I wrote 'often'. There are obviously cases where there is a real, if small, risk.
Another thing: You already say that you would be fine paying for the person you will buy the house in the future. However, many indemnity policies run in perpetuity so in principle will still apply and there will be no need to buy a new one.
How do you make sure that the possibility is actually non-existent?
If it's only a small one-time payment, then it probably makes sense to pay someone that much just for doing the work to verify that it's not going to happen.
Planning enforcement is 12 years from the date at which it became obvious that building works had been completed. So if you build a castle inside a agricultural shed and take the shed down after 12 years, the timer starts after you take down the shed. Also, there are many caveats and Planning law is complicated and often quite vague in Britain, so you should take advice on your specific situation.
Planning enforcement for domestic development in England is definitely 4 years, I agree with the parent comment.
There was that one guy who covered his castle in hay bales for just over 4 years before revealing it and they took enforcement action successfully, but that's a bit different. I'm guessing that's why you said "became obvious that building works had been completed" but actually the rule is simply completion date but the courts decided that this guy was taking the piss so much that he still violated the intended meaning of the law. Your odd agricultural shed example may well fall foul of the same thing but I don't see what that has to do with the parent comment.
It's 10 years (not 12) in some cases but they wouldn't concern most domestic developments.
Any insurance of the type referred to by the parent comment is 100% definitely a swindle.
Indeed if you have a fixed fee conveyancing deal (I'm not sure about the UK but it seems common over here) the solicitor is probably losing money just on the administration of filling out the paperwork and then billing you that 4 pounds...
Those indemnity policies are so common that any related admin work has to be included into fixed fee conveyancing deals.
In fact I suspect that these policies are so common partly because of they save solicitors' time and efforts, not least when they are on a fixed fee: They don't spend time looking into things they just suggest indemnity policies so they are covered and move on.
In the Oxford English Dictionary there are 19 separate entries for "butt" with various disparate senses, including a bundle of cloth, a headland, and a funnel-shaped wicker basket. Some of those entries have complex, multiple etymologies, but the word "buttock" is said to be derived from "butt, n.6" for which the etymology is given as: "Of uncertain origin."
So there you are. Happy to be of no assistance whatsoever!
My favorite piece-of-land word is "gore," which is either a triangular parcel formed where roads intersect at an acute angle, or a narrow strip of land (usually also an acute triangle) of uncertain ownership resulting from inaccurate surveying. It's derived from the Old English word for spear, which also came to mean stab, and a stab wound, and eventually blood-n-guts in general.
Yep. Old English word for spear was "gar". One vegetable was related to the leek, but they described the clove as spear-shaped: the gar-leek. https://www.etymonline.com/word/garlic
Hah. I assume the English were looking at the budding shoot (aka "garlic scape" [0]) when they named it, whereas the Germans were looking at the knobby root (Knoblauch = knob leek).
Also interesting is we (US, at least) have a fish called a 'gar' that looks similar to a pike, but isn't technically. Pike are family Esocidae and gar are family Lepisosteidae.
People in this thread might be interested in the History of English Podcast. I highly recommend it if you're interested in etymology and/or history: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
> The meaning "quickly, swiftly, rapidly" was perhaps in Old English, certainly by c. 1200, probably from or developed under influence of Old Norse fast "firmly, fast." This sense developed, apparently in Scandinavian, from that of "firmly, strongly, vigorously" (to run hard means the same as to run fast; also compare fast asleep, also compare Old Norse drekka fast "to drink hard," telja fast "to give (someone) a severe lesson"). Or perhaps from the notion of a runner who "sticks" close to whatever he is chasing (compare Old Danish fast "much, swiftly, at once, near to, almost," and sense evolution of German fix "fast, fixed; fast, quick, nimble," from Latin fixus). The expression fast by "near, close, beside" also is said to be from Scandinavian. To fast talk someone (v.) is recorded by 1946.
> "act of fasting," late Old English fæsten "voluntary abstinence from food and drink or from certain kinds of food," especially, but not necessarily, as a religious duty; either from the verb in Old English or from Old Norse fasta "a fast, fasting, season for fasting," from a Proto-Germanic noun formed from the verbal root of fast (v.). In earlier Old English fæsten meant "fortress, cloister, enclosure, prison."
Yeah, in a town near the one I grew up in, there's a street called 'Butt Hole Lane'. That made me laugh a lot when I was younger, even when my parents explained to me what the 'Butt' in this context meant.
Fun fact: just like this old tax that the Italian residents are unhappy with, every single person that was old enough to vote for their representatives who then voted to ratify the income tax amendment in the USA is now dead. There is no one alive in the USA that was in any way represented in the vote for income tax; conversely everyone that is alive in the US today and is subject to it did not have any input into it: they were simply born into it, unrepresented, just as these Italians were.
There is a strong argument for all laws having an expiration date a few years past the expected lifespan of the youngest constituent of the represented population that passed it, otherwise we end up ruled primarily by those long dead, entirely unknown to us, as the laws pile up, amended in perpetuity but never aging out.
It appears that elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back. I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.
> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.
If your long-term is long enough, you're guaranteed to be correct...
Putting that aside, even if you think your 'big change' is right and prudent and will Make Things Better, other people have their own plans. Now, unless you get rid of popular representation, you have legal hysteresis, and everyone's planning horizon lasts until the Next Big Change. Suddenly nobody's building nothing.
So you're left with a mess or an authoritarian government. Resistance to wild swings is actual conservatism at work, and is a very good thing.
> elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back
I find this to be a crippling problem of how politics works in modern democracies.
Taxes are a great example, because almost every country will increase it, but never decrease it. They’ll think of a 100 new ways to extract taxes, but never remove outdated ones.
This is where supportability comes into play: a short time after the was people understood the need for such measure, today you would have a revolution for such a tax level. In 20 years it will come back, no worries, people will love it.
I’m not sure about that either —- there were no tax havens back then. It’s so much easier since 80s to work around the tax system with off shore companies (granted it is getting harder for the past decade)
Or was I unaware the widespread loophole back in the old days?
Not so much a loophole, but back in the 50s all kinds of income were treated the same which meant you could write off your income against your investment losses.
I think it's naive to assume that rich Americans back then weren't working the system. If it was so great, why do we tax different kinds of income differently now?
I have always believed that the majority of the complexity in the tax code is derived from lobbying by special interests to lower taxes on their specific sort of income.
Lately though it seems like tax filing companies have been the ones primarily responsible for sustaining the complexity of the tax code - though whenever someone's particular benefit comes up that group tends to get pretty vocal (i.e. exemptions for SALT taxes and home owner/child credits)
Very true: my personal solution is to shop for better countries. There's no way to meaningfully influence the government's overreach.
Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.
> Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.
Hrm, I disagree. I think the most beneficial countries will attract better talent. Having a low tax bill doesn't mean much if I need to pay for things privately.
I also personally emigrated from the US owing to the fact that healthcare there is immoral and it felt like (about a decade ago when I left) the country was on the path to major unrest. I've been quite happy up here in Canada where I pay more taxes but get to work with people who aren't burdened down by the stress of untreated health issues.
> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.
Can anyone of the downvoters say a few words? To me this seems both obvious and non-partisan. What we're doing is accruing ever more laws, creating a centuries-old legal code base without ever removing technical debt. This seems unwise.
Law isn't a simple practice due to the breadth of subjects it covers - but it is very simplified by the human factor. When laws are enforced they are done so after advocacy from a pair of humans and by the judgement of a human for penalty and possibly guilt (in some cases guilt is determined by a pool of jurors).
This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb machine that is, at it's best ability, able to look at two numbers and tell you which one is bigger. When it comes to software edge cases must be explicit and factors must be encodable - violations must be recognizable by an algorithm and all cases must be covered. Compare that to the law where generally there are a set of guidelines that have slowly evolved over time to cover more and more edge cases - but viewing any law ever written as completely true to the letter would be a mistake - there will always be carve outs and reasonable judgement entering the picture.
I think the main problem with criticizing the creation of more laws is that we don't currently have laws to cover every situation and it's unreasonable to think we ever will - it'd be nice to get rid of some of the stupid ones but I strongly suspect you'll see this town in Italy end up being freed from any obligations since this hereditary claim is pretty bonkers.
Lastly I might point at countries with a long continuous legal history like England which hasn't changed governments violently or due to outside influence in a loooong time. There are a lot of really crazy real estate claims there, sure - but for the day to day stuff, the laws work. The cost of training lawyers might slowly be creeping up[1] but we aren't anywhere near a critical point of being unable to apply laws. I suspect that point will never be reached and we'll just see more and more specialty in legal professions - instead of an advocate in 1820 you can now hire a lawyer specialized in watershed rights. I expect that trend to continue with specialties deepening and growing further apart just like we've seen with development. You couldn't hire an "ops" guy in the 70's - everyone was expected to be well versed in operating system configuration, interaction and most were probably expected to be familiar with design.
So, I don't think this is actually an issue at quite the level you mentioned - but I do think it's one of these slowly creeping growth factors that makes us more vulnerable to societal system collapse.
1. I'd guess really slowly though since even in the US where precedent is a factor most relevant case rulings are probably from before 1870.
> This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb machine that is, at it's best ability, able to look at two numbers and tell you which one is bigger.
And even that can get wonky. Do a search for "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg.
Who else sees a software dev analogy here. Perhaps we need a law that says every 10 years we have a "sprint" to address the "technical dept" of anachronistic laws.
> What then also of the minority that lives under these laws? I never once consented to them, and yet must submit to the majority.
And you receive their benefit too. You might not like paying taxes but you receive the benefit of paying taxes, that is why you are forced to pay taxes like everyone else. Some people get more benefit than others but we all get something from paying taxes. If you don't like paying taxes, then you are free to move to a place where there are no taxes and no benefit from them. I recommend Somalia, I heard it's lovely this time of year.
The US has a severe representation issue. Other folks have spoken well about the advantages of proportional representation vs. FPTP but if you're looking for something to blame for an effective lack of representation I'd look there first.
Honestly, if the US election before this previous one didn't have primaries and was an open field race there is almost no chance the former president would have been elected - and if the government was run on a parliamentary system even if his party had won there's no chance they would've brought him in as PM.
I am a one issue voter and my issue is proportional representation.
I completely agree as far as voting methods are concerned and do think it would be a better system, but I still don't like giving a group of people rights to commit acts considered immoral when done by an individual.
I wanted to first address the question of being overridden. When you enter into any sort of relationship - dating, marriage, inhabiting a city, living in a country - you are agreeing to compromises to grease the wheels of society. Some people are always going to lose sometime - ideally those aren't always the same people and nobody loses an excessively burdensome amount but... If you live in a city of three million you probably fervently disagree with a few hundred thousand of the other residents on some issues you consider particularly important.
On the topic of actions considered immoral (or I'll start with illegal) when done by an individual - war actually only fits into this category in some countries, in a lot of areas murder in self-defense is legal and if 100 ninjas tried to murder you and it was clearly a case of self defense where all other actions were barred your actions might be legal in the US - they would probably be universally recognized as moral by everyone except the most staunch utilitarians which I assume would respond: "Dude - take the trolley in the face, duh - even if they started it it's 100 vs 1 lives lost".
That all said, war is frequently not a case of self-defense and is often abused for silly things like resource acquisition and prestige. Better representation allows us to severely punish governments that either look like they're going to go against the societal will or remove them after the fact - buuut there will be times when a country goes into unpopular wars justly due to either domestic misinformation or classification of information creating a different breadth of knowledge between law makers and the populace - with the former seeming more likely and the latter being pretty repulsive. And the freedom to act in response to aggression is one we need to keep separated from the slow response time of something like a pure democracy. This was actually the case in Athens where Strategos were free to act during their term (assuming an agreement between the then Strategoi) and were only subject to removal during regularly scheduled sessions.
I am strongly against war myself but I would be pretty happy with the US entering and occupying posts in civilian areas on both sides of the israeli/palestinian border to dissuade both parties from continuing attacks - I'm similarly okay with cypric occupation since that situation seems similarly unresolvable. War is pretty complicated but I don't think it's all that distinct from other issues a nation needs to deal with, poor representation leads to actions that go against the public will.
Consider yourself lucky that you can reliably trace land ownership for centuries. Eastern Europe went through multiple upheavals in last 100 years and every time the wheel of history turned, quite a lot of land was dispossessed/repossessed by law.
In Slovakia we basically ended up with two versions of land registry (called register "C" and "E") and the ongoing effort to reconcile them. Many properties are said to be "nevysporiadané" = "not settled up" which means all the owners are not known - previous landowner died or emigrated and it waits for their descendants to claim it. It isn't possible to build anything on these lots.
In east germany, there are strange constellations, were someone might own the ground, but not the house upon it and vice versa. Some pieces of land were bought, before the original "owning" aristocrats descendants laid claim to them.
In west germany, there were, originally very small, medieval fields, so a "Flurbereinigung" happened several times. This led to larger fields to work on, but below, some of them still are patchwork, paid yearly for, some only leaseholds from the church, some even still paid in natural products (deputats -> m^3 wood, grain, sugar) as per contract.
Some parts of lands have owners, but due to the exponential nature of "Erbengemeinschaften" (community of heirs), the land is splitting up more with each generation of inheritance and some of the heirs do not want to lay claim to the ever smaller pieces of land in the middle of nowhere, due to the juristic costs. Which in the long run leads to atomized "unclaimed" land.
Also the church runs alot of old folks homes, and thus persuades old people to transfer there land to the church, so in some towns, half the houses are owned by the catholic church, the children renting there parents home from them. Strange constellations.
> Also the church runs alot of old folks homes, and thus persuades old people to transfer there land to the church, so in some towns, half the houses are owned by the catholic church
Is the church exempt from property tax in Germany?
If so this sounds like a return to 'mortmain' principle of middle ages which caused a lot of conflict between government and church historically:
England developed quicker than the rest of Europe because the King limited the accumulation of tax exempt real estate by the church. The church was essentially largest absentee corporate land holder in Europe. It left large quantities of land vacant and did not contribute public fees towards infrastructure improvements.
This split ownership reminds me of a similar situation in the USA, where different entities can own the surface rights and mineral rights. What gets weird, is owning the mineral rights legally entitles you to use the surface (to a limited degree) to access the minerals.
This is pretty common in the Rockies in Colorado, although not usually exercised! Many, many lots are zoned M for Mining and the situation you mentioned applies just like that.
It is a major factor why Blacks have lost ownership of farmland in the United States. Rather than try to explain it myself, here is an excerpt from "Mine!" by Jacob Heller and James Salzman:
> Currently, Black farmers constitute less than 1 percent of American farmers, and Black families continue to lose farms at a rate three times that of whites. The cause of this dramatic farm loss starts with inheritance law, in particular the consequences for family ownership when someone dies without making a will. Many poor Black farmers in the South were suspicious of local white lawyers, and for good reason, so they never made wills. This suspicion continues today, even among some wealthy Black people. Aretha Franklin and Prince could well have afforded the very best attorneys, yet both passed away without making wills. Overall, three-quarters of Black people do not have wills, more than double the percentage of whites.
> The result for Black-owned land in the Southeast is that over a quarter is now heir property, averaging eight co-owners, five of whom live outside the region. Amazingly, more land in Mississippi is owned by Black people living in Chicago than by those living in Mississippi itself. …
> Inheritance law imposes enormous costs on Black people—indeed, on anyone who does not write a will. When you die without a will, the state splits ownership among people the law designates as heirs, in a specified priority: spouses and children, grandchildren, parents, siblings, and then more remote relatives.
> Partition sales … are the primary way that most heir property is lost. Partition sales are not just of historical interest. Across the South, heir property currently makes up a third of remaining Black-owned farmland—roughly 3.5 million acres worth about $30 billion. …
> In 1887 John Brown bought eighty acres of land in Rankin County, Mississippi. He was part of the great wave of freed slaves who invested their life savings in farmland. … When he died in 1935, he did not leave a will. Ownership of his land split among his wife and nine children. In time they all died, also without wills, so the land was split further among grandchildren. … In 1978 Ruth Brown asked a court to divide the farm so she would own her share of the land outright—a manageable forty-five acres out of John’s original eighty. The other sixty-six Brown heirs would still co-own the balance, in shares ranging from 1/18th of the farm down to a tiny 1/19,440th. The court agreed to partition the parcel, but not by physically dividing the land. Instead, the judge ordered the entire farm sold and the money partitioned among the heirs according to their ownership fractions.
> As often happens in such forced partition sales, a single outside company was the only bidder. In Brown’s case, it was a local white-owned lumber company that wanted to cut the timber.
> Even though the family collectively valued the farm far above its auction price, neither Brown nor any other heir placed a bid. Why? Partly because state law often requires the bid to be fully or substantially paid in cash on auction day, a rule that makes bidding impossible for most ordinary owners. Partly because there was no simple way for the Brown heirs to organize a joint family bid that pulled together resources from the scattered owners. Many heirs did not even know they were owners. And no single Brown heir could top the lumber company’s lowball bid. This is commonplace. When a judge orders land auctioned on courthouse steps, the deal is final, even though the price is usually far below what is considered fair market value in an ordinary transaction.
Isn't there any law saying that "if no one claims it for N years, the state takes it" / "if someone else uses a place for N years and no one else claims it, that person can claim it?" [1]
I had the same thought. Reading the Wikipedia page for the respective Italian law [1], it seems to me (but IANAL) that it would only apply to ownership of material things, not apply to monetary claims.
However, Italy also abolished all noble titles with the fall of the monarchy in 1946 -- I would have also expected that fiefs and any associated claims had been extinguished at the same time...
Unsure about Italy, but common law has the doctrine of laches, which many US jurisdictions recognize. It effectively says, "Sure, you have a claim, but you sat on it too long so tough luck."
It would be a bit nasty to make a such law considering that the "state"(usually the communist state) stole the property and the rightful owners were persecuted.
Add to that the Hungarian inheritance rules - properties were divided evenly between the heirs, so I can now own a 13/6240 of an agricultural field. The farm still pays me a small yearly dividend and offers to buy my share, but that's really everything what can be done with it.
Historically, divisible estates were the norm in most of Europe in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. By the time the High Middle Ages rolls around, England and France switch to a system of primogeniture, granting all the lands to the oldest son. However, in Germany, divisibility remained the norm. This resulted in a tendency of lands in the Holy Roman Empire to proliferate as compared to France or England.
I don't know any specifics about Hungary, but I presume that the general norm is as in Germany rather than England/France.
This is only slightly worse than Slovakia's official online Cadastral (property ownership) map, which still requires using Internet Explorer and downloading an ActiveX Plugin.
https://mapa.katasterportal.sk/kapor2/index.asp
I'm still trying to find a way to access it from Linux without going through a VM.
I found my great grandfather and great granduncle listed on what seem to be (from skimming autotranslations) missing landowner documents in the Czech Republic, dated as recently as the beginning of 2021 (web version linked below). Which was surprising to me, since they immigrated to the US around 1905, before the obvious 20th century upheavals. I guess unless property is valuable enough for someone (including the state) to invest effort in securing ownership of, it can sit with unclear ownership forever, more or less.
https://www.hlidamsikatastr.cz/Katastr/Neznami-vlastnici says unclaimed land will be forfeited to the state in 2023, I guess this must be highly specific to the Czech Republic. Still surprising to me that it'd take 100+ years!
> which means all the owners are not known - previous landowner died or emigrated and it waits for their descendants to claim it. It isn't possible to build anything on these lots
In the U.S. there is no central registrar, deeds are recorded at local level, and owners are regularly found by collecting property tax. Back tax is tracked independently of ownership so if true owner fails to pay tax within a few years there is lien or foreclosure.
I'm guessing in Slovakia they might only tax sales or income of property rather than passive enclosure? If back taxes are levied on parcel the owners should immediately make themselves known.
"The Earth belongs in usufruct to the living. The dead have neither powers nor rights over it" - Thomas Jefferson
There are large swaths of land in the US which are under ownership but unusable because the owners are absentee and the cost and complexity of locating the owner or pursuing a lein are both greater than the value of the property. In my part of the country there are places where this situation has persisted for fifty years, as the auction value of the property is only in the hundreds of dollars per acre and back property tax in the same range ($16 per year)... and these are properties under modern plats. Dairy farms expand acre by acre, sometimes hiring private investigators in an effort to locate owners of adjacent lots to make a buyout offer. This isn't really all that unusual in the rural west, it's a legacy of the post-WWII suburban real estate boom.
Even in higher property value areas I would be surprised to see a tax delinquency action taken after just a few years. The administrative cost is substantial.
> In my part of the country there are places where this situation has persisted for fifty years, as the auction value of the property is only in the hundreds of dollars per acre
At 2021 market valuations, not lower public assessments?
> Even in higher property value areas I would be surprised to see a tax delinquency action taken after just a few years. The administrative cost is substantial
In some areas owner only has a few years then legal department will process tax sale within few months. It's true that in many areas property tax less than 1% of true market value. Prior to 1930s when no state or local government was collecting sales tax it used to be closer 3%.
Right, actual sale prices range $300-$800 per acre for many failed Southwestern (NM, CO, AZ, southeastern CA, probably UT and Eastern OR but I'm less knowledgeable in that area) suburban developments. Often they are picked up by sketchy flippers who sell them to poorly informed buyers at "highly inflated" rates of say $3000 seller financed (e.g. $99 down, $50 per month on terms sometimes as long as 30 years). Searching "land investment" will turn up a bunch of these. While described as "near town" they are often over an hour out with poor access and no utilities. Ironically the tax assessed value on these is usually more in line with actual valuation as they have seen zero or negative price change over time.
Perhaps this is different in other parts of the country, I've just never heard of a tax sale running that quickly. Typically in the city here it takes a decade or more, especially if the ownership situation is at all complex.
I grew up in an area of upstate New York where the land was mostly apportioned into feudal estates by the Dutch. There were anti-rent rebellions in the 19th century and the descendants of the patroons stopped collecting the rent.
But… folks never had title to their land and were effectively stuck until a law was passed in the 1960s. It’s really interesting as the effect is that many families have lived there for 400 years, and newcomers all appeared in the 1970s onward.
After the English takeover of New Netherland in 1664 and American independence in 1783, the system continued with the granting of large tracts known as manors, and sometimes referred to as patroonships.
Kind of strange that the Dutch are blamed for this, when the British took over mid-1600 and the Americans after the independence war end-1700.
Those are two moments where this whole notion of feudal estates could easily have been abolished, but for some reason the new rulers decided against this.
I’m not “blaming” anyone, these are just facts on the ground from nearly 500 years ago. I was introduced to this stuff as a teenager working for an old farm - their family was one of a few that had a land grant. The original taxes were 10 pigs and some wheat!
The Dutch colonial system, continued in some form for a period of time. I’m afraid I’m ignorant of the details and complexity of land policy as the English, the pre-Constitutional US and current US government took over. Adding to the complexity, New York has had at least 4 constitutions in the post-colonial era!
There’s similar examples in the US — Baltimore has or had land rents from the British colonial era.
Personally it’s a fascinating subject to me, and if I was a history professor, I would have probably studied it! Alas, I’m not.
I haven't got the facts either. Yet a lot has happened in those 500 years, and it would be a shame not to mention that.
After mid-1600 the Dutch have had very little to say in New York (or should I say New Amsterdam, still such a shame they changed the name..), when the British decided New York should be theirs, despite being at peace with the Dutch.
I wonder if the Dutch heritage still be taught in schools in the US.
Standardization of core curriculum and political changes will probably eliminate most of that. The people who cared about this stuff have scattered as society became more mobile and slave holdings make most of these figures impolitic.
It was not unusual in the past for changes in sovereignty to still respect the prior established private property rights. For instance both the Louisiana purchase and annexation of California promised in law to respect existing Spanish land grants. So while this was the case in legal theory, these rights were not immune to corruption.
I grew up on land in the Bay Area that formerly belonged to the Ranchero de las Pulgas, and now I live in the east bay. I don't remember the name of the Ranchero here, but much of it had already been sold off to yankee traders before 1846. In both cases after annexation the widows controlling the remaining land were ripped-off by shyster lawyers. IIRC in one or both cases the widow's own lawyer! This despite the fact the family of Ranchero de las Pulgas had thrown in with the American cause during the Mexican American War.
A little bit of both. Albany was a minor transport and trading hub where Dutch remained the primary language for some time. It later became a regional banking and rail/canal hub.
Most of the patroon land started getting sold off as the value skyrocketed when the Erie Canal and railroads were built. The area I initially referred to was a backwater area where the land had limited value due to topography.
However if they want the rights, they're possible legible also of having to pay to the tenants for all the improvements they did so far, and very likely taxes on the property.
Note that in a common law system, this would be thrown out of court under either "acquiescence" (if you don't raise a fuss for a very long time when someone unknowingly infringes your rights, you can lose those rights), or "laches" (if you wait long enough to make a legal claim that the defendant is injured by e.g. having made economic decisions in ignorance of that claim).
Not sure about the equivalent Italian law, but I would be deeply surprised if there isn't something similar.
Not only in Italy. I remember studying law for one semester at the University and our professor mentioned that this was still applicable in Romania, circa 2005.
That's a more specific thing regarding hereditary titles. Acquiescence in the common law applies to any right. Could be water rights, grazing rights, certain intellectual property rights (though those are generally registered in a way that infringing on them legally "unknowing" is hard), &c
If I have grazing rights on land that someone else owns, but don't actually graze there for decades and a new owner doesn't know about those rights, I can't then come back mad that his new fence infringes on the right that I've never asserted and he's not aware of.
In Italy we have something like that, that should translate to usucaption[0] or acquisitive prescription. The term for real estate is 20 years, for other types of property it is shorter.
Whereas in the common law, it being the f** common law, there's no fixed term and it's just "what does the judge think is in line with similar past cases".
Now wondering which European countries still have intact feudal law. Scotland abolished feudal tenure in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc... ; most of the feu burdens were abolished or explicitly ported across. England&Wales still retains the feudal system in places and occasionally people are hit by "chancel repair liability" or somesuch.
The chivalric court still exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Court_of_Chivalry "prior to [1954], the Court had not sat for two centuries and before hearing the case, the Court first had to rule whether it still existed"
As does the last relic of real feudal power: the House of Lords, the last of Europe's unelected legislatures outside a microstate.
It's a surprisingly hard question to answer. "feudal" is a historiographic term which was first coined in the late 18th century. It saw various interpretations over the course of the 19th and 20th century through various historical schools. Another term, at least for mainland Europe, would be "Ancien Régime" which denotes the political and socio-economic system before the French Revolution.
As for legal traditions, you're looking at concepts such as customs (coutumes) and seigneurial rights (banalités or bans) which varied from region to region. The former were normative and mostly local. From the 12th century onwards, Civil Law based on Roman Law started to coalesce. The major driver was monarchs gradually succeeding in centralizing and consolidating their power throughout Europe. Through violence (wars, subduing insurrections,...) and through gradual establishing a powerful administrations (typical example: the Dukes of Burgundy).
The French Revolution swept all of that away. The period between 1789 and 1830 saw a fracturing of European nobility and their power, and subsequent consolidation into nation states based on constitutional powers.
Put in a different way, if you were born in 1760 and lived to 1840 (80 years), you'd experience a "societal collapse" (to describe with a hyperbole) in which any and all "old" ways that governed life were overthrown and replaced by an entirely new way of organizing society.
>Put in a different way, if you were born in 1760 and lived to 1840 (80 years), you'd experience a "societal collapse" (to describe with a hyperbole) in which any and all "old" ways that governed life were overthrown and replaced by an entirely new way of organizing society.
This is not hyperbole, Napoleon promptly took over France as Emperor due to the power vacuum and plunged the entirety of Europe into what is now termed "total war." Millions and millions and millions dead, and not everyone wanted a "Republic" or "freedom" driven at the point of the sword from the French.
There are millions dead in between the "ideals" of the Revolution and the later Republics you skipped over.
>Historians have explored how the Napoleonic wars became total wars. Most historians argue that the escalation in size and scope came from two sources. First was the ideological clash between revolutionary/egalitarian and conservative/hierarchical belief systems. Second was the emergence of nationalism in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere that made these "people's wars" instead of contests between monarchs.[138] Bell has argued that even more important than ideology and nationalism were the intellectual transformations in the culture of war that came about through the Enlightenment.[139] One factor, he says, is that war was no longer a routine event but a transforming experience for societies—a total experience.
Arguably, comment forms on online fora don't provide much affordances for writing college grade essays. Neither will the audience read long comments start-to-end. I was well aware of how much I left out for the sake of terseness and staying on topic.
While the Napoleonic Wars left several million dead over the course of 12 years, Europe itself counted a population of 160 million at the time. Depending on who you were, your experience may have vastly differed. Millions lived in poverty and remained living in poverty, tens thousands emigrated to the New World or within Europe, and then there were plenty who seized the opportunity to acquire wealth (small and large) and power during that time through commerce and new opportunities on a local, regional and/or international level. That doesn't downplay the horrible experiences related to early 19th century warfare: it's adding important nuance to life in Europe as it was.
I'm calling the "societal collapse" hyperbole because I was aware of it lacked that nuance. Alternatively, I could have called called it "societal disruption on macro level" or some such.
But again, online fora do not make for a great medium catering to nuanced historiography about the experience of living in early 19th century Europe. It's also pretty much off-topic as this discussion is about leftover vestiges of the Ancien Régime in modern legal systems.
There are some vestiges of "udal" land law that are still valid in the Shetland and Orkney Islands. This comes down from Norse law (the Norse controlled those islands for long periods of time). A major difference is that under the law in the rest of the UK a coastal landowner only owns the land down to the high tide line, while under udal law the landowner owns the land down to the low tide line. This obviously has implications for docks, pipelines, cables, etc.
Also, in some of the Channel Islands, Queen Elizabeth isn't technically the Queen, but rather the Duke of Normandy (despite being female, she's called the "Duke", or "The Queen, our Duke").
Also, while swans are the property of the Crown in most of the United Kingdom, they are the property of the people in the Orkney Islands according to Udal Law [0]:
> Today, the Queen still has ownership of all swans in the UK except in one small corner of the British Isles - the Orkney Isles.
> Under Udal Law, the ancient Norse system of inheritance and law, which the Viking settlers brought to Orkney, the swan is the property of the people, rather than the Crown.
> The case was proven in 1910 by a Kirkwall lawyer who, accompanied by his friend, the Procurator-Fiscal, went out to Harray Loch and shot a swan. The case went to the High Court and the Crown lost.
I suspect that none of the European countries to the eastern side of the Iron Curtain retained feudal law, or much of the "legacy" law in general. That, I guess, is one of the few potential upsides of any revolution: an opportunity arises to just throw away a lot of pre-existing arrangements and re-draw them anew in (hopefully) more sensible way. Of course, the quality of the new design and/or its implementation is not guaranteed, results may vary.
As is usual: it's not like the Inclosure Acts were met with unbridled enthusiasm from the rural folk. On the contrary, there were revolts and subsequent hanging of the unruly peasants.
> I suspect that none of the European countries to the eastern side of the Iron Curtain retained feudal law, or much of the "legacy" law in general.
Rather make that "no country other than the US and UK+Commonwealth countries". These two countries are probably the only ones in the world that haven't suffered any kind of comprehensive revolution in the last 100 years, and it shows.
Not just in the absurd amount of precedence cases or the existence of "case law" in general, but also in issues that directly impact the functioning of democracy (i.e. US voting being on Tuesdays because back 200 years ago Sunday was for church visits, Monday for traveling on horseback to the voting booth and Wednesday back home - made sense back then, nowadays it serves as a very effective tool to disenfranchise poor people from voting) or threaten the foundations of the existence of life (hundreds years old water claims that nowhere near closely reflect the actual cost of the water, leading to farmers and Nestle running unsustainable operations just "because they're allowed" without thinking if what they're doing can permanently destroy aquifers).
Every other country has had all that historical baggage unceremoniously dropped.
You do realize revolutions usually involve killing people and all kinds of other violence? The price for “unceremoniously dropping” what you consider historical baggage are real lives and livelihoods of not just those you deem undesirable or unfair, but more often than not regular folks caught in the middle.
If you want these laws changed then vote, run for office, work on a movement. Channel that energy productively instead of destructively.
Change is possible peacefully, but of course a “revolution” sounds way cooler.
Large parts of the Italian civil and penal code date back to the Statuto Albertino and to Roman civil law, just like there are principles in common between UK and US common law.
A lot of countries in Western Europe haven't had a revolution since the early 19th century. Yes, many of them were briefly occupied by the Nazis, but after liberation the pre-war constitution was reinstated.
For instance, the Dutch still claim that their Constitution dates from 1815 (though it has been substantially rewritten several times, most recently in 1983).
The reason why courts in the Anglosphere rely so much on precedent and case law while those in Continental Europe and its former colonies don't isn't a lack of revolutions (except insofar as Napoleon would have replaced common law with the Code Napoleon had he made it across the Channel). It's that legal codes developed differently in England and in the rest of Europe in the medieval period.
> For instance, the Dutch still claim that their Constitution dates from 1815 (though it has been substantially rewritten several times, most recently in 1983).
Peaceful rewrites are good. Treating Constitutions as holy texts is a problem.
> nowadays it serves as a very effective tool to disenfranchise poor people from voting
Which is one reason that your entire premise is largely false today. Early voting and mail-in voting is a thing pretty much everywhere now, going on the last day of voting to vote in person is an option, but not required.
One curious case is Church Taxes in Switzerland, where the state collects taxes on behalf of three traditional Christian denominations. For individuals, this is often no big deal; if you don't want to pay, you just write a letter declaring you want to leave the church.
However, in most Swiss cantons, legal entities are also subject to church taxes, and get to pick neither the denomination to whom they pay, nor do they get to leave the church. It was explained to me that this was a compensation deal worked out when the state expropriated the monasteries in Switzerland in the 19th century.
> For a further two years, the superior had the option of claiming compensation; this was fixed at a single payment of a size that, when invested at an annual rate of 2.5%, it would yield interest equal to the former feu duty. Because inflation had eroded the value of duties, which had been fixed many years before, this payment was in most cases extremely small compared with the current value of the land.
This is interesting in that it isn't really "abolishing" payments in so much as you are required to establish an endowment so to speak. Really it is inflation (enabled by fiat) that allowed one to escape this duty it seems...
From a quick search, it seems this "tax" is part of an ancient (roman law) land contract called Emphyteusis[1]
that's still recognized as a valid by the italian civil codex, despite not being in common use.
I don't think it has anything to do with special nobiliar priviledges: it's just that these barons claim to own
land and the relative rights under this contract.
Apparently, the land owner has no obligations, but the lease-holder instead is bound to pay
an annual canon and "improve the land", whatever that means, perpetually.
You don't have to serve a lord nor be a peasant, you pay for the use of "their" land.
This happens in many other places in Italy. One example that comes to mind is a part of the money collected from fishing permits on Lake Maggiore (tragically famous lately for the Stress cabin disaster) going to the pockets of an aristocratic family who "owns" the lake and the fishing rights.
Why do you assume taxes are a payment for services? In most cases there is no written contract with rights and obligations of each party and there is no implied right or obligation of any sort.
No, not at all. But being a Baron over somebody may have obligations? If they were not rendered (it was all neglected for 60 years) perhaps something could be negotiated based on that. E.g. the baron provides protection - that certainly wasn't happening.
And I do note that there's obligation to the Baron's lord. Doing an appeal there is another route.
If these descendants are trying to claim an old form of payment, why, in concept, can't the residents invoke a similarly old form of responsibility like Noblesse Oblige?
>"Why do you assume taxes are a payment for services?"
Because the only alternative in this case is the outright theft.
>"there is no implied right or obligation of any sort."
Sorry but there is implied obligation. I totally expect to get some services in return for money taken from me and I suspect I am not alone. For experiment try sending part of government that does actual services for constituents for a year long vacation and see what happens.
If I hold stock in a company I receive magic free money without doing anything. There is a substantial difference in how the relation is created though
I was referring to how you enter and exit the contract, a comapany only pais stockholders if it is productive in at least some ways, while the renter can be trapped in a terrible expensive place that offers little value.
I find these property rights that go back centuries a bit dubious.
How was the property obtained in the first place? There were no modern laws at the time and common people had much fewer rights and protections. If the property was not obtained through outright violence, it was obtained in an environment that very much discriminated against common people, and God knows how much fraud and deception occurred.
It actually happened in my hometown a couple of years ago that some people produced a document from the 1500s entitling them to a huge expanse of land. Now at the time the land was conquered through war, and then that empire collapsed and another occupying empire took its place and that one also collapsed, and yet another foreign people came and went before independence was finally declared.
The people who actually lived on this land were always the same people. But somehow they don't have the right to the property that they lived on for almost a millennium, because a bunch of foreigners stole it through violence a few centuries ago and then handed what wasn't theirs to other foreigners. And now these foreigners think they have a claim to this land because their great ancestor murdered thousands of local people and took it for himself.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
At risk of throwing a sub thread of chaos, this was what I found interesting in these comments.
Specifically regarding the current Sheikh Jarrah conflict. Who actually 'owns' the land, and what does that mean? It seems like it completely depends on what time frame you look at and what claims the winner of war has or can enforce with force.
In the US, what about the Native Nations and the canceling or flat out ignoring of past legal documents. or the land given to former slaves later taken away.
Personally I lean towards your opinions. if the ruling power won't act humanely then reparations/compensation seems like the 2nd best option.
Yeah, but capitalism isn't exactly fair either, with wealth ending up at a small percentage of people who clearly didn't work as much or took as much risk as all the other people combined. So if you go with that argument, then a much bigger reform should happen, not just the annihilation of these taxes.
I guess this is a joke about the continued claim of the Savoy house to a title that was abolished 75 years ago, and which was pretty tenuous to begin with (they're basically a French family, who effectively conquered the country in the XIX century by exploiting unification movements across the area - which were, ironically, ideologically republican, but had to accept the monarchy out of realpolitik).
it's also unclear whose person would carry the title, even if the title where valid, as while Amedeo's lineage would be the actual claimant, the Vittorio lineage is strongly opposing that and they're presenting themselves as the successors.
I'm not sure that's true, the monarchy in Italy was relatively modern and short lived, preceded by a patchwork of republics with wonderful election systems.
Here's an example of how the elections for Doxe de Venezia worked in the Republic of Venice[0]:
> Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge. Election required at least twenty-five votes out of forty-one, nine votes out of eleven or twelve, or seven votes out of nine electors.
Not just republics - this particular claim descends through the short-lived King of Italy (which missed the age of absolutism by several centuries) from the Papal States.
Italian sources[1] say that the right of the Auguet Barons is 30% of the sale price of a house in the oldest part of the village. This is very different from what the SMH article says.
A relatively common local tax in mediaeval England was a 'Scott' charge on property and/or land, used to fund some locally necessary common good. Because the charge was most often area-based, landowners/householders just outside of the charging area were said to get away 'Scott free' - a phrase still frequently encountered in UK English.
For instance in the area where I grew up (Romney Marshes, Kent) a Scott tax used to be levied on local householders and landowners to help pay for the local sea defences (because: most of the Romney Marshes is below sea level). People living on land above sea level were exempt from the charge, thus 'Scott free'. The levy was paid in cash or thorn bushes; failure to pay led to an ear being nailed to the church door[1].
And the tax is still - apparently - alive today ... according to a brief report in the UK's Law Society's Gazette[2].
When my brother bought his house (UK, built in the early 2000s), we had to buy insurance against the local church needing a new roof. The residents of the area were responsible for local church upkepe because of a medieval edict. It was only about £40 luckily...
What a boutade. Even if all fiefdom weren't canceled after the demonarchization process, Italy still has usucapione laws that are fairly short and to the point.
For the uninitiated, usocapione is the legal process whereby those who are in possession of an item (in this case, land) can become legal owners over a period of time. Presumably the lack of enforcement over a very long time (60 years being mentioned in the article) implies that these feudal rights might not be enforceable anymore.
> The feudal arrangement is so unusual it has prompted questions in parliament. Last year, MPs asked the economy minister if there were legal avenues to abolish the “burden”.
That seems like it would have the reverse effect of acknowledging its legitimacy, at the very least retroactively.
funnily enough, this hasn't come up on italian newspapers.
I checked the Corriere (corriere.it), Repubblica (repubblica.it) and il fatto quotidiano (ilfattoquotidiano.it) since they're three different voices with vastly different opinions on what to report and what not to report.
There was a process for them to be “registered” after the US took over. And many were split up as the owners had little cash to pay for upkeep.
But there are properties that derive from ranchos that carry on the rights. I recall on oceanside plot where beach access was not open to the public (contravening CA law) as it wasn’t a requirement in Mexican law.
This sounds like a perfect way to destroy your family’s reputation. I can’t imagine the thought process and sense of entitlement that leads you to try to become a feudal lord in the 21st century, but I know that I could never get along with somebody like that.
No way. The owner of the land is inscribed in the cadastral books. If he's from Swiss, then he can collect the money. But also pay the overdue land taxes. If he is not ...
before refusing to pay, I would first check all the figures: that tax could be lower of what they do pay now as Italian council taxes (pretty expensive) :)
Because the person who posted it thought someone else on Hacker News might be interested.
That's pretty much the only reason one needs.
I was interested enough to read the article and you were interested enough,albeit in a negative sense, to add your comment; so it seems they were right.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I currently read everything published by Rest of World. It's a new website focusing on tech scenes of countries other than the US. The quality is very high.
Thank you for suggesting this. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it aims to provide non-Western (not just non-US) perspectives and coverage. Based on the few articles I browsed so far, it will likely become one of my regulars so I appreciate that you mentioned it.
Leftover laws are weird things.
EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice - http://www.lordsandladies.org/the-butts.htm SFW ; "butt" was the name of an archery range - was removed from the law in England: https://loweringthebar.net/2010/06/do-englishmen-still-have-...