 | This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Sub modo" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
| An editor has performed a search and found that sufficient sources exist to establish the subject's notability. These sources may be described in edit summaries or found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Sub modo" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Sub modo is Latin for "subject to a modification or qualification". In a contract sub modo, the agreement between the parties may be altered or limited within certain parameters. For example, in a 19th-century United States Supreme Court case, Eldridge v. Trezevant, 160 U.S. 452, a landowner with property adjoining the Mississippi River filed for an injunction to block the State of Louisiana from building a levee through his property. Citing an earlier Louisiana case, Ruch v. New Orleans, 43 La. Ann. 275, the court upheld a lower court's dismissal of the injunction, stating
Under the doctrine of a servitude, the riparian owner enjoys his property sub modo, i.e. subject to the right of the public to reserve space enough for levees, public works, and the like; that over this space the front proprietor never acquires complete dominion. It never passes free of this reservation to a purchaser.
In other words, in this particular case the court held that there are certain inherent limitations to property ownership.
An agreement sub modo does not just apply to real property. Any agreement, contract, license, privilege, or right can be sub modo.
Generally, the term is considered archaic and somewhat dandified.
References
| IUS | This legal article about a Latin phrase is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it. |