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NLJ this week: Baffling signs may adversely affect your property rights

27 September 2024
Issue: 8087 / Categories: Legal News , Property
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Putting up a sign—for example, ‘no parking’—is a useful & easy way to maintain a legal right, thus preventing prescriptive easements from arising. But what happens if the sign is ambiguous, misleading or inappropriate?

In this week’s NLJ, Thomas Rothwell and Kavish Shah, Falcon Chambers, look at a series of cases in which the intended meaning was not conveyed.

For example, Cleveland Golf Club’s sign was too vague, or perhaps too politely phrased. Instead of a clear ‘Keep out’, the club warned it could be dangerous to trespass on the course. Rothwell and Shah write: ‘The High Court held that, if the owners of the golf course had wished to make clear that walking over the golf course was objected to, it would have been easy for them to erect notices to that effect… As it happened, the wording sounded more like a health and safety warning. It was therefore insufficiently clear to bring home to passers-by that the use of the golf course was objected to.’

The authors present a clutch of cases. As they write, ‘The increasing body of case law in this area shows no sign of abating’.

MOVERS & SHAKERS

Excello Law—five appointments

Excello Law—five appointments

Fee-share firm expands across key practice areas with senior appointments

Irwin Mitchell—Grace Morahan

Irwin Mitchell—Grace Morahan

International divorce team welcomes new hire

Switalskis—14 trainee solicitors

Switalskis—14 trainee solicitors

Firm welcomes largest training cohort in its history

NEWS
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charlie Mercer and Astrid Gillam of Stewarts crunch the numbers on civil fraud claims in the English courts, in this week's NLJ. New data shows civil fraud claims rising steadily since 2014, with the King’s Bench Division overtaking the Commercial Court as the forum of choice for lower-value disputes
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
Artificial intelligence may be revolutionising the law, but its misuse could wreck cases and careers, warns Clare Arthurs of Penningtons Manches Cooper in this week's NLJ
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