News

Don Pinto, a member of the firm’s Litigation Department, was quoted in a Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly article, “Building Requirements for Landlocked Parcels Clarified,” on June 7, 2010. The article describes a recent Land Court ruling that a proposed development of a landlocked parcel of woodland did not comply with a 20-foot front yard setback requirement in the local zoning by-law, because the parcel did not have any frontage of a street.

 From the article:

“Donald Pinto Jr., a land-use lawyer at Rackemann, Sawyer & Brewster in Boston, who was not involved in the case, said that, generally speaking, there is a public policy against creating landlocked lots and rendering such property useless. ‘But that tends to yield to the intent of the parties in the deed that created the landlocked situation as well as to the clear provisions of the local zoning bylaw, and that’s what we have here.’ At the same time, while acknowledging the common presumption that a landlocked parcel can never be built upon, Pinto said there are ways to access land that seems to be landlocked. ‘It sometimes means going back 100 years and looking at the transaction that created the landlocked parcel,’ Pinto said, speaking as a matter of general principle, not with respect to any particular case. ‘Different doctrines of implied easement sometimes come into play and can often result in a landlocked parcel that was long thought unbuildable to be found buildable where the reason it was unbuildable was lack of access.’”

For the entire article, Go to:

http://www.masslawyersweekly.com/index.cfm/archive/view/id/456354