Arlington County Easement Attorney: Right of Way, Air Rights, and Federal Land Adjacency Disputes
By Anthony I. Shin, Esq. | Civil Litigation & Real Estate Disputes | Shin Law Office
BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT
Easements look simple until they go to court. In Arlington County, where the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery, and Reagan National Airport border private parcels and Metro corridor high rises produce air rights and view shed disputes, easement litigation involves frameworks you rarely see anywhere else in Virginia.
As a Northern Virginia attorney representing landowners across Arlington, I have handled easement disputes from inner Beltway shared driveways to Rosslyn high rise air rights questions. Call 571-445-6565 or contact Shin Law Office to discuss your situation.
Three Categories of Easements in Virginia
Virginia recognizes three primary categories of easements, each with its own rules and its own typical fact pattern. Express easements are created by a written document, usually recorded in the land records. Implied easements arise from the circumstances surrounding the division of a parent tract or from prior continuous use. Prescriptive easements arise when one party has openly and adversely used another party’s land for 20 years.
The category determines what evidence matters and what defenses are available. Express easements are decided largely by the document. Implied and prescriptive easements depend on what people did over time, which makes those cases evidence-intensive and witness-dependent.
Express Easements and Interpretation Fights
An express easement is created by a written instrument, usually a deed of easement, that describes the easement, identifies the dominant and servient estates, and states what the easement holder may do. Express easements are the cleanest category to litigate because the document itself is the primary evidence. The fights are usually over interpretation. What does the easement actually permit? Can the dominant estate widen the access? Can the servient estate gate the entrance? When the language is ambiguous, the court applies Virginia’s rules of construction, looks at the parties’ conduct over time, and reaches a result based on what the original parties most likely intended.
Air Rights and View Shed Easements
Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and the Crystal City and Pentagon City high-rise districts give rise to a rare category of easement dispute elsewhere in Virginia. Air rights easements, view shed easements, light and air easements, and overhead utility easements all affect the development potential of high-rise parcels. When a new building proposes to rise above an adjacent building’s view shed easement, or when a recorded easement limits the building height a developer expected to achieve, the dispute can stop a multimillion-dollar project until the easement question is resolved. These cases often turn on decades-old recorded instruments that no one carefully reviewed when the parcels traded hands.
Federal Land Adjacency Easements
Arlington borders extensive federal property: the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery, Reagan National Airport, and various Department of Defense and General Services Administration parcels. These federal properties carry buffer easements, view shed protections, federal aviation administration height restrictions near the airport, and access easements that affect every adjoining private parcel. Disputes involving federal easements can raise takings questions, just compensation issues, and federal jurisdictional considerations that can move the case to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia rather than state court.
Implied Easements and Prescriptive Easements
When a single tract is divided into two parcels and one parcel becomes landlocked, Virginia law recognizes an easement by necessity over the other parcel to provide access. Implied easements can also arise where a use was apparent and continuous before the division of the parent tract. Prescriptive easements arise when one party openly, continuously, and adversely uses another party’s land for a specific purpose for twenty years, which is five years longer than the adverse possession period. In Arlington, prescriptive easement claims often involve shared driveways, walkways through neighboring lots, and drainage paths running between adjacent properties in older single-family neighborhoods.
Why this matters in Arlington specifically:
Arlington’s compressed footprint, federal adjacencies, and high-rise corridors all elevate the stakes of an easement dispute beyond what a similar dispute would carry in less urban Virginia jurisdictions. Understanding which framework applies, whether state or federal, is the first step in any case involving these properties.
How to Protect Your Property
If you own land that others use, three steps can protect your position. Examine the Arlington land records to identify any recorded easements that bind your property. For high-rise developments, examine recorded view shed and air rights instruments dating back to the original parcel assemblage. Walk your boundaries periodically to identify any uses by neighbors or the public that could ripen into prescriptive easements. Document all permissive uses in writing so that the use cannot later be characterized as adverse.
Easement issues are one piece of a broader property dispute picture. For full context on how these cases interact with boundary, adverse possession, zoning, and title issues, see my comprehensive Arlington County property dispute lawyer guide.
Talk to an Arlington County Easement Attorney Today
Easement disputes do not get easier with time. Whether you are protecting an air rights easement in Rosslyn, defending against a prescriptive claim in Lyon Park, navigating a federal land adjacency issue near the Pentagon, or seeking access to a landlocked parcel, the right time to call is now.
Call 571-445-6565 or contact Shin Law Office to discuss your easement matter.
References
Code of Virginia. (n.d.). Section 11-2. When written contract or memorandum required. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title11/chapter1/section11-2/
Code of Virginia. (n.d.). Section 55.1-407. Effect of recording on subsequent purchasers. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title55.1/chapter4/section55.1-407/
Arlington County Government. (n.d.). Circuit Court. https://www.arlingtonva.us/Government/Courts/Circuit
