@BorisJohnson
United Kingdom government official
Today we move forward to Step 3 of our cautious roadmap to freedom.
This is what you need to know ↓
2:44
From
UK Prime Minister
2:47 AM · May 17, 2021·
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1394182676295344128
Boris Johnson and Allegra Mostyn-Owen, Sultans Ball, 1986
https://www.insidehook.com/article/books/photos-decadent-oxford-1980s-dafydd-jones/slides/slide-402689
If you strike oil in your back garden don't give up the day job - because it belongs to the Queen. How did that happen?
It used to be so simple: if you owned a piece of land you also owned everything above and beneath it, from heaven to hell [Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos].
A legal maxim of dubious Roman heritage, this made its debut in English common law in 1587, in a case enabling a property developer who owned land extending to the boundary of his neighbour's house to build upwards, even though this meant blocking a window through which his neighbour had enjoyed natural light for 30 years.
Even today, a vertical column, centred on each plot of land with sides matching its boundaries, extending indefinitely into outer space and down through the Earth's crust, is the 3D vision of land ownership that prevails in legal discourse, if only to highlight its absurdity.
One obvious drawback of the model, underlined by Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Aikens, is that, towards the centre of the Earth, all landowners would have "a lot of neighbours".
After detailed consideration, former deputy president of the Supreme Court Lord Hope said in 2010 that the "simple notion" of such a column was "plainly no longer tenable".
He cited a smattering of litigious US landowners who in 1946 found themselves powerless to prevent aircraft flying low over their farms, even though they claimed many of their chickens had been frightened by the noise so terribly that they clattered into the sides of their hutches and died of their injuries.
Unmoved by the poultry's plight, US Supreme Court Justice Douglas ruled: "The air is a public highway… Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea."
Before the twentieth century it was assumed a land owner's rights extended from the centre of the earth to the top of the sky. But a series of key court cases have challenged that notion.
1931: US court rules that a sewer 150ft deep was not on land belonging to the home owner above.
1946: US Supreme court rules that transcontinental flights do not trespass on land below.
1978: High Court of England and Wales says aerial photography plane was not trespassing.
2010: UK Supreme Court rules that diagonal drilling down to 2,800ft from an adjacent plot of land is still trespassing under the surface.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25742871
Chair 2018
War Room 2019
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/donald-trump-sparks-fury-posing-12914158
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9223639/donald-trump-churchill-war-rooms/