Willow and Hearth Quotes Jason Rittie on Legal Definition of Shared Driveway Easement

Einhorn Barbarito partner Jason Rittie, who leads the firm’s Real Estate practice, is quoted in an article in Willow and Hearth on the legal aspects of a shared driveway.

The article expands on a legal dispute between two neighbors over a shared driveway that resulted in years of litigation that climbed all the way to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, where the justices based their ruling on “an implied easement.”

The article states that most shared driveway disputes track back to one of four legal categories, and which one applies changes everything about who wins:

• An express easement is written into the deed or a separate recorded agreement, spelling out who can use the strip and for what.
• The implied easement is different: it exists even without paperwork, when a property was clearly designed to depend on that access — courts look at whether the driveway was “reasonably necessary” to the land’s use, as the Rhode Island justices put it.
• A prescriptive easement can arise from years of open, continuous use, similar to adverse possession.
• And an easement by necessity applies when a lot is otherwise landlocked.

Rittie tells the editors that when homeowners are unsure about their property line, they should pull their title insurance policy and survey, since a recorded deed or easement agreement usually spells out the driveway’s exact location and each side’s obligations.

He says homeowners should then follow a sequence of steps before taking actions that impact property lines, such as building a fence. If the survey and the reality on the ground don’t match, a licensed surveyor should resolve the discrepancy before it becomes a filing. When there’s no recorded easement at all, but one household has used the driveway for years without objection, that history can support a prescriptive-easement claim in court instead.

Rittie says that after documentation is settled, homeowners can try to negotiate with a neighbor, with litigation a last resort. He says that order matters because once a family is standing in front of a judge, the outcome depends heavily on paperwork that was filed, or never filed, decades before either side moved in.

The full article can be read at Willow and Hearth.