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Contracted restrictions on ownership rights in property law

Having ownership rights in real property entails having powers with respect to the property. By virtue of these ownership rights, owners can use the property, grant rights in the property and transfer the property to another. Owners may, however, choose to waive such rights. The aim of the study presented in the thesis is to determine what legal effects can ensue when property owners voluntarily restrict the scope of their own ownership rights. What applies, for instance, if a property owner submits to a prohibition against transferring the property, agrees upon an option to buy, or commits to using or refraining from using the property in a specific way?

The effects of diverse types of restrictions on ownership rights in relation to the owner and in relation to third parties vary. No uniform picture emerges in precedents set by the Swedish Supreme Court and opinions vary in the jurisprudential literature. A cohesive study of the legal effects that ensue under prevailing law when property owners voluntar­ily restrict their ownership rights is carried out in this thesis.

The author examines restrictions on ownership rights in relation to ownership itself and to principles of property law, and studies how the restrictions can be aligned with the regulatory system of the Swedish Land Code. Ownership rights are conceptualised mainly in line with the ‘bundle of rights’ metaphor, where the ownership rights are viewed as different sticks in the bundle. This is intended to put focus on the links between ownership rights and the real property to gain a clearer understanding of how restrictions on ownership rights affect the bundle of ownership rights. When a property owner removes a stick, the bundle of ownership rights shrinks and the questions that arise are what effects this has for the owner and for various third parties that thereafter have to do with the bundle in some way.

The methodological and theoretical foundations for the subsequent study are laid in the first two sections of the thesis. The legal effects of various restrictions on ownership rights under prevailing law are thereafter studied in the third and fourth sections. The results of the study and the conclusions that could be drawn from them are summarised in the last section.