In 2015, Glenn and Valerie Wilson stretched a chain across a strip of gravel on their property in Richmond, Rhode Island, and backed it up with a stockade fence. That strip belonged to a shared driveway system built into a hillside subdivision, laid out that way years earlier to avoid disturbing wetlands the town wouldn’t let anyone touch. Their neighbors, Charles and Nicole Martin, needed the same strip so a school bus carrying their son, who received door-to-door service as a disability accommodation, could turn around safely instead of backing blind down a steep grade. The fence stayed up anyway, and what followed was years of litigation that climbed all the way to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, which in March 2021 ruled the Martins had an implied easement the Wilsons could not block. It’s the kind of case real estate attorneys reach for when they explain why a shared driveway is rarely as tidy as it looks on a plat map.
Four Kinds of Right-of-Way, One Recurring Fight
Most shared-driveway disputes trace back to one of four legal categories, and which one applies changes everything about who wins. An express easement is written into the deed or a separate recorded agreement, spelling out who can use the strip and for what. The implied easement the Martins relied on is different: it exists even without paperwork, when a property was clearly designed to depend on that access — courts look at whether the driveway was “reasonably necessary” to the land’s use, as the Rhode Island justices put it. A prescriptive easement can arise from years of open, continuous use, similar to adverse possession. And an easement by necessity applies when a lot is otherwise landlocked. Jason Rittie, a partner and chair of the real estate practice at the New Jersey firm Einhorn Barbarito, advises homeowners to start by pulling their title insurance policy and survey, since a recorded deed or easement agreement usually spells out the driveway’s exact location and each side’s obligations before anyone calls a lawyer.
What a Property Lawyer Tells You Before the Fence Goes Up
Rittie’s guidance lays out a sequence rather than a single fix. If the survey and the reality on the ground don’t match, a licensed surveyor should resolve the discrepancy before it becomes a filing. When there’s no recorded easement at all but one household has used the driveway for years without objection, that history can support a prescriptive-easement claim in court instead. Only after documentation is settled does he point clients toward negotiation, and litigation as a last resort. That order matters because once a family is standing in front of a judge, the outcome depends heavily on paperwork that was filed, or never filed, decades before either side moved in.
When the Old Agreement No Longer Fits
Ryan Linn, an attorney at Graham Law in Ohio, focuses on what happens after an easement already exists on paper. Terms of a driveway easement, he notes, can be negotiated and changed at any time if both owners agree, and a property owner may even be able to terminate or modify one if the conditions that originally made it necessary have changed (a subdivided lot later gaining its own street frontage, for instance). That flexibility is often news to homeowners who assume a recorded easement is permanent. It isn’t automatically permanent, but changing or ending one still generally requires either mutual agreement or a court order, not a fence and a chain.
Why Some Families Just Build Around the Problem
Litigation over an easement can run for years, as the Martins’ six-year fight from fence to Supreme Court ruling shows. Given that timeline, some homeowners skip the courtroom entirely and pay to solve the problem with concrete instead: pouring an entirely new curb cut and driveway on their own frontage so they no longer depend on the contested strip at all. It isn’t cheap, and it isn’t always possible — it requires enough road frontage, a municipal curb-cut permit, and sometimes a variance if local code restricts a second access point on one lot. But for a household that has already spent thousands on legal fees with no resolution in sight, a new driveway can be the faster and ultimately cheaper way out, even when the family never gives up its legal claim to the original right-of-way.
Reading the Deed Before the Moving Truck Arrives
Both attorneys’ advice points to the same starting place: know what’s actually recorded before a dispute forces the question. A title search and survey during the home-buying process will usually surface a shared driveway easement long before a neighbor plants a fence post. For anyone already living with an informal arrangement, putting it in writing and recording it, even now, tends to prevent exactly the kind of standoff that sent the Martins and the Wilsons to court. The Rhode Island case turned on a driveway that had existed for decades without an argument, until it suddenly needed one. That’s the pattern in nearly every version of this dispute: the shared strip of asphalt works fine until it doesn’t, and by then, the only cheap fix was the one nobody wrote down years earlier.
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