Every autumn, apples from your tree fall onto your neighbor’s grass. “In my opinion, those are great apples.?
Question by lim07041957: Every autumn, apples from your tree fall onto your neighbor’s grass. “In my opinion, those are great apples.?
You’re lucky,” you tell him when he complains. You refuse to remove them. The fruit attracts trespassing boys, then rots and brings bees. What defense(s) could you reasonably raise?
a. Failure to mitigate- the neighbor could have raked the apples up with minimal burden.
b. Charitable immunity-you’ve charitably donated the apples to him.
c. Consent- there’s an implied consent when buying a house to living with natural events such as falling apples, dogs trampling your flower garden, and the occasional rotten egg thrown at your house on Halloween.
Add your own answer in the comments!
4 Responses to Every autumn, apples from your tree fall onto your neighbor’s grass. “In my opinion, those are great apples.?
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The only defense that is reasonable is A.
B doesn’t apply because he doesn’t want the apples in the first place, so you can’t donate them to him. C is not a possible defense because such consent does not exist. Perhaps if it described only the apple tree you could say C and claim that he knew about the tree when he moved in, but the rest of C invalidates it.
Knight of Truth
June 10, 2012 at 11:10 am
a) is the most reasonable.
the others make sense, but it wouldn’t make a good or sesable argument.
mhmm.
June 10, 2012 at 11:36 am
a. makes sense.
part of c makes sense. In as much as it relates to the apples, it does. You might also expect maple and cottonwood seeds in your yard and leaves in the fall (I, for example, have no trees in my front yard but I still have to rake a dozen bags full of leaves in the fall because my neighbors have big trees). But free-roaming dogs and egging are both illegal so that’s not a good analogy.
At the same time, your neighbor probably has the legal right to trim the branches of your tree right up to the property line. That could seriously damage your apple tree, so it’s probably best to reach an amicable solution. Why would you refuse to remove the fallen apples?
rundown73
June 10, 2012 at 11:50 am
I used to have an apple tree. Raking up hundreds of fallen apples every day is not “minimal burden”, especially if he is old and has health problems. It is time consuming. Then there’s the problem of storing them until garbage day. They also attract wild animals, that could create a rabies danger for him and you. Your neighbor could decide to just cut off the part of the tree that hangs over into his yard. This is legal. It will look awful and decrease the value of your property. Just pick them up.
Soldier's Girl
June 10, 2012 at 12:12 pm