Easement
An easement is a right to use someone else's land for a specific purpose. The owner keeps the land; someone else has a defined right over part of it.
The two kinds#
Appurtenant. Attached to a neighbouring parcel and benefiting whoever owns it. A driveway easement letting one property reach the road across another. It runs with both parcels — burdening one and benefiting the other, through every future change of ownership.
In gross. Benefiting a person or entity rather than a parcel. Utility easements are the standard example: the power company holds the right regardless of who owns the land it crosses.
They run with the land#
Which is what makes them a title matter rather than a neighbourly arrangement.
A recorded easement binds every subsequent owner of the burdened property. Buying the land does not extinguish it, and neither does not knowing about it.
That is why easements appear as exceptions on a title commitment — the insurer is telling you that this right exists, will continue to exist, and is not covered.
How they arise#
By grant. Written, signed, recorded. The clean case.
By necessity. Where a parcel would otherwise be landlocked, courts may find an easement by necessity across land that was once part of the same holding.
By prescription. Long, open, continuous use without permission, on principles similar to adverse possession — and note that Minn. Stat. 508.02 removes registered Torrens land from adverse possession entirely.
By implication, from a prior use apparent at the time land was divided.
The unwritten routes are litigated rather than recorded, which makes them expensive and uncertain.
Where it matters most#
Access on rural property.
A parcel without legal access to a public road is worth a fraction of one with it. Landlocked parcels appear disproportionately in tax-forfeited inventory, and the reason is circular — nobody could reach it, so nobody valued it, so nobody paid taxes on it.
Before buying any parcel where access crosses someone else's land, establish whether the access is a recorded easement or an arrangement that has simply been tolerated. A driveway used for forty years with no recorded right is a lawsuit waiting for the neighbour to sell.
Reading the exceptions#
The title commitment lists easements found in the search. The commitment gives you the recording reference; the recorded document gives you the scope.
Get the document. A "utility easement" could be a two-foot strip along a boundary or a fifty-foot corridor through the middle of the buildable area.
That distinction determines what can be built and where, and it is discoverable before closing for the cost of pulling one recorded instrument.