Ownership and possession are both standardized sets or packages of rights over pieces of property, but Roman law also allowed the packages to be broken up in other ways. The owner could retain his title to an item but transfer control over it (for a time), or retain both title and control while granting specific rights (say, the right to walk across his land). This greater flexibility was of commercial value, since it gave owners a variety of ways to exploit their property and allowed them to deal with a variety of other business partners. But, as we will see, these partial rights were also useful for other reasons. The first section of this chapter treats temporary but near-total transfers of rights (usus and usufructus); the second treats a set of more limited rights (called “servitudes”) that could be traded. The third section treats rights a neighbor could claim over next-door property. The last one will cover the limitations produced by joint ownership.

USUS AND USUFRUCT

These are the rights to the use of an object with (usufruct) or without (usus) the right to keep the “fruits” of the property (e.g., fruit from an orchard or ore from a mine, rental income, offspring of livestock). The combination package, usufruct, is more common, and, since the rules for this and for usus by itself are largely the same, I will speak only of usufruct in what follows.