PROPRIETARY ESTOPPEL

Proprietary Estoppel

Table of Contents

Introduction2

The Defendant's Assurances2

Written or Oral3

Liberal Approach4

Reasonable Belief5

It Leads the Claimant Reasonably to Rely on Assurances5

Acting significantly to his Detriment for Unconscionability7

Unconscionability8

References11

Proprietary Estoppel

Introduction

Estoppel is a legal term that preludes a person to deviate the act which has been established by law or made through his commitment. There is a range of prerequisite for myriad cases of estoppels, but in the context of property, a person must prove three things to prove his case. Following are the three prerequisites for the proprietary estoppels.

The Defendant's Assurances

The assurance of the defendant's assurance or conduct should be clarified and unambiguous in relation to the identified property. Proprietary estoppel is a flexible doctrine that acts on the conscience of a landowner. Accordingly, the landowner must have made some assurance to the claimant that either he would refrain from exercising his strict legal rights over his own land. The claimant might have some present or future right or use over that land, while, in many cases, the assurance will be as to some property right over the land. It is clear from the House of Lords' decision in Thorner v. Majors (2009) that this is not necessary in order for proprietary estoppel to be established. In that case, the landowner had never promised the claimant any right, or even made any express promises (the assurance was implied); hut the claim of estoppel was upheld. According to Lord Walker, the assurance had to be 'clear enough' and this would depend hugely on context. In the context, of a family arrangement concerning a farm (Thorner), it might be enough for some common assurance to have been made concerning the future ownership of the land; in the context of a commercial arrangement, however, it was likely that a much more assurance would be needed (Cobbe). Thus, according to Thorner, the House of Lords' earlier decision in Cobbe was not to be taken as always requiring an assurance of a property right, although that conclusion was justified on the facts of that case. The 19th-century courts developed estoppel as a rule of evidence of importance in business cases. The idea was that where a statement of fact had been made, and relied upon by the person to whom it was addressed, the maker of the statement could be prevented from going back on that statement.

Written or Oral

This analysis of estoppel inevitably means that the form that the assurance take is irrelevant, and it may be given orally, arise from conduct, or even be in the form of a written instrument that is not itself enforceable as a contract to transfer an interest in land (as apparently in Flowermix v. Site Developments. The assurance may be 'unilateral' in that it was offered freely by the landowner, but it might also arise from a mutual understanding between the parties about the use of the land.

The assurance may be express or implied, as where a landowner refrains from preventing the claimant using his land in a way, or the ...