| Bass v Gregory | |
|---|---|
The Jolly Angler, Nottingham | |
| Court | Queen's Bench |
| Citation(s) | (1890) 25 QBD 481 |
| Court membership | |
| Judge(s) sitting | = Sir Charles Edward Pollock, Baron of the Court of Exchequer and Serjeant-at-Law |
| Keywords | |
| Easements, prescription, tort | |
Bass v Gregory (1890) is an English tort law and English land law case, concerning a ventilation shaft on under or through adjoining land (a "passage of air"). It was deemed an easement by prescription, having been used without long interruptions for forty years. At the time of the case, the law, and the leading judge made a fine technical distinction between prescription by statute and by the common law doctrine of lost modern grant.
English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil, rather than criminal law, that usually requires a payment of money to make up for damage that is caused. Alongside contracts and unjust enrichment, tort law is usually seen as forming one of the three main pillars of the law of obligations.
English land law is the law of real property in England and Wales. Because of its heavy historical and social significance, land is usually seen as the most important part of English property law. Ownership of land has its roots in the Anglo-Saxon system of Bookland and in the Anglo-Saxon multiple estate, a feudal system transformed by William the Conqueror and his influx of many new chief landlords after 1066. The modern law's sources derive from the old courts of common law and equity which includes legislation such as the Law of Property Act 1925, the Settled Land Act 1925, the Land Charges Act 1972, the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996 and the Land Registration Act 2002, and the European Convention on Human Rights. At its core, English land law involves the acquisition, content and priority of rights and obligations among people with interests in land. Having a property right in land, as opposed to a contractual or some other personal right, matters because it creates privileges over other people's claims, particularly if the land is sold on, the possessor goes insolvent, or when claiming various remedies, like specific performance, in court. Capital taxation, the industrial revolution and reform of the established church has resulted in a shift from predominant ownership by the church and landed gentry to largely agricultural, minority aristocratic ownership. This means today sites for development belong to a complex web of owners able meet market demand-side forces for development, tempered by supply-side forces including the values enshrined in public planning policy to protect green spaces and promote sustainable, locally diverse and socially useful development of land.
