JUST AN OLD-FASHIONED LOVE SONG …
The other day, I had a faithful reader ask whether he could use the Massachusetts Rule to trim a neighbor’s pesky oak tree back to the property line. “Of course,” I said, with some important caveats.
The question got me thinking last night about the Massachusetts Rule. It’s good sport these days to criticize the Massachusetts Rule — that landowners are limited to trimming tree roots and branches back to the property as the exclusive remedy for encroachment by a neighbor’s tree — as being a relic of a time gone by, when everyone lived in a rural or semi-rural area and times were simpler. The more modern Hawaii Rule — that permits a landowner to sue for damages and injunctive relief when the encroachment causes “sensible harm” — makes more sense in urban environments and in our modern-day (and, dare we say, litigious) society.
The Virginia Supreme Court said as much in Fancher v. Fagella. And North Dakota weighed in with Herring v. Lisbon Partners Credit Fund. When it comes to the old Massachusetts Rule, it’s pretty much “you hold him down, and we’ll kick him.”
Call me an apostate, but I’m skeptical that the Massachusetts Rule’s demise is such a good thing. So today, we’ll sing a love song to the Massachusetts Rule. And a reprise of Kentucky’s leading encroachment case provides the perfect illustration. Schwalbach’s neighbor, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, had trees that were dropping leaves and twigs that were as dead as the cemetery’s patrons. When Schwalbach sued, the Court held that the only remedy when branches behave like normal trees – specifically, by dropping twigs and leaves – is Massachusetts-style self-help.
Tennessee criticized the approach 17 years later as old-fashioned in Lane v. W.J. Curry Sons, but the plain fact is that the Hawaii Rule would have had precisely the same outcome: under that rule, branches dropping a normal load of twigs and leaves were not causing actual, sensible harm. No court would have intervened to order any outcome other than the one found in the Schwalbach case.
The case is a perfect example of how the facts of the case — be they extreme (such as in Virginia’s Fancher case or North Dakota’s Herring case) or slight annoyance (such as in today’s case) — drive the decisions. It’s not just that hard cases make bad law, as I pointed out yesterday: the law is always driven by the facts of the case. A careful comparison of the decisions establishing the Massachusetts Rule to the decisions favoring the Hawaii Rule suggests that the rules may not be very far apart at all.
Schwalbach v. Forest Lawn Memorial Park, 687 S.W.2d 551 (Ct.App.Ky. 1985). The Schwalbachs owned an apartment building located next to the Forest Lawn Cemetery. They bought the property in 1969. By 1972, they were whining that overhanging limbs from some of Forest Lawn’s trees dropped twigs and leaves and other detritus. What a shocking indignity.
Forest Lawn trimmed some of the branches, but the problem persisted. The Schwalbachs were more into brickbats than chainsaws. They never trimmed any of the overhanging branches themselves but were content to let their mouthpiece do their work for them in court.
Forest Lawn will handle the dead people … but the Schwalbachs are responsible for the dead leaves.
The Schwalbachs replaced their flat roof with a pitched one, at the cost of $14,300, a result of damage done by an accumulation of leaves and twigs. The trial court found that the damages resulted from normal deadfall of leaves and small debris from the trees. It applied the Massachusetts Rule set forth in Michalson v. Nutting, concluding that the Schwalbachs should have removed the offending limbs back to the boundary line.
The Schwalbachs appealed.
Held: Kentucky follows the Massachusetts Rule. The Court rejected the Schwalbachs’ argument that Kentucky should follow the rule that every owner should be held responsible for private nuisances on real estate, essentially an ordinary negligence rule. The Court observed that “[i]mposing liability upon a landowner for damage resulting from the natural dropping of leaves and other ordinary debris would result in innumerable lawsuits and impose liability upon a landowner for the natural processes and cycles of trees.”
The Court did suggest that were the tree in question dead and likely to fall and cause serious injury, “[a] claim for damages or removal of such a tree might be based on the theory of negligence for damages or nuisance for removal.”
This decision was criticized by the Tennessee Supreme Court in Lane v. W.J. Curry & Sons, 92 S.W.3d 355 (Tenn., 2002) as among those antiquated cases that didn’t permit any remedy for encroaching branches and roots beyond self-help.
– Tom Root
Tree and Neighbor Law For Homeowners and Professionals 