Cadastral, Title and Property Law
These questions test the legal machinery behind the lines you set: how title passes, what a deed must contain, what recording accomplishes, and how Connecticut treats highways, water and long occupation.
Deeds and descriptions
- A deed needs parties, words of grant, a description sufficient to identify the land, and delivery with acceptance. Consideration need not be recited.
- Descriptions range from monument-based and adjoiner calls (strongest) to area alone (weakest). A description by lot and map incorporates the filed map by reference.
- Connecticut is a recording jurisdiction: a later purchaser who takes without notice and records first is protected; unrecorded interests lose to a subsequent bona fide purchaser.
Encumbrances and rights
- Easements may be express, implied, by necessity, or prescriptive; prescription requires fifteen years of adverse, open, continuous use.
- Adverse possession also runs fifteen years under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-575, and requires actual, open, exclusive, continuous and hostile use.
- Highway boundaries: a conveyance bounded by a road carries to the centerline where the grantor owns the fee there; a call to the south side limits the grant to the edge.
- Tidal and submerged lands belong to the state below mean high water. Accretion belongs to the upland owner; avulsion and reliction are treated differently.
Worked example
A deed conveys a parcel bounded northerly by the south side of Maple Street, and the grantor owns the fee to the centerline. Because the south-side call is an express limitation, the boundary is the south line of the layout, not the centerline. The map should show the layout width and cite the town layout document. Had the deed said merely bounded by Maple Street, the centerline presumption would apply, subject to the public easement.
Traps
- Applying the centerline presumption where the deed expressly stops at the side line.
- Confusing state ownership below mean high water with the upland owner's riparian rights.
- Treating a quitclaim deed as conveying nothing; it conveys whatever the grantor holds.
- Skipping probate records, town layout files and unrecorded interests in the search.