Term of the day: landlocked

Travel obligations and internet issues are going to be interfering with daily posts for at least some of the next 10 days to two weeks. So nobody will go into withdrawal, however, The Legal Genealogist offers…

The term of the day:

LANDLOCKED.

Seems perfectly appropriate for a word to be chosen like this one on a day when I’m demonstrably not landlocked. (Cruising with The Master Genealogist, this is a sea day en route from Canada back to the United States as a matter of fact.)

But landlocked does not mean that the land involved is away from the sea or other waterways. Instead, in the law it has to do with access to real property.

Think about how you get to a piece of land. What do you have to do to get there? Turning in off a public street, it wouldn’t be landlocked. But oh… what about if there was no public road?

That’s when this term comes into play:

“LANDLOCKED. An expression sometimes applied to a piece of land belonging to one person and surrounded by land belonging to other persons, so that it cannot be approached except over their land.”¹

So the reason the piece of land indicated in this map is landlocked is not because it doesn’t touch the water — it’s because you can’t get there without crossing someone else’s land.

SOURCES

Image: Open Clip Art, courtesy user Midkiffaries