Definition
A civil law easement entitling the owner of a building that is surrounded by other structures — and therefore has no natural outlet for rainwater or waste water — to discharge that water onto adjacent rooftops, courtyards, or ground belonging to neighboring landowners. The right addresses a practical problem of urban or dense construction: a landlocked building that cannot shed water to open ground must have some legal mechanism for disposing of runoff, or the building becomes untenable.
The term derives from Roman civil law servitude doctrine and passed through continental legal tradition into jurisdictions with mixed or civil law heritage. It corresponds closely to the common law easement of drip, which gives a landowner the right to have water naturally falling from the eaves of a building drip onto a neighbor's land.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in older American cases and treatises addressing easement law in states with civil law influence — particularly New York, Louisiana, and other jurisdictions that drew heavily on Roman or French legal tradition in their early property law. Researchers encountering the term in nineteenth-century case reporters should treat it as a signal that the court is reasoning from civil law servitude principles, not purely from common law easement doctrine. The analytical framework — including how the right is created, transferred, and extinguished — may differ from standard common law treatment.
The citation to 15 Barb. 96 (a New York Barbour Supreme Court report) in both Black's and Bouvier's points to mid-nineteenth-century New York courts explicitly bridging civil law and common law easement concepts. Researchers tracing the development of drainage and water-shedding easements in American law will find this line of cases useful for understanding how courts absorbed civil law servitude categories into common law property frameworks.
In Louisiana, where civil law property doctrine remained dominant, the concept persists under servitude law and should be researched using Louisiana Civil Code provisions on predial servitudes rather than common law easement doctrine.
Do not expect the term aque immittende itself to appear in modern case law or statutes. It has largely been absorbed into the broader category of drainage or drip easements. A modern dispute involving the same facts would typically be litigated under easement by prescription, easement by necessity, or statutory drainage rights — none of which will use this Latin phrase.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Bouvier's are in close agreement on the substance. Both define the term as a civil law servitude allowing a surrounded building to discharge water onto neighboring property, and both cross-reference the common law easement of drip as the functional equivalent.
Bouvier's provides marginally more doctrinal texture, citing Lalaure's treatise on servitudes (Des Servitudes, p. 23) as authority for the civil law foundation. This citation is useful because it grounds the entry in French civil law commentary, consistent with how American courts in civil-law-influenced states received and applied the doctrine.
Neither dictionary addresses how the easement is created (whether by grant, prescription, or necessity), how it is quantified, or what remedies are available when it is obstructed — gaps that are significant for research. For those questions, the underlying civil law servitude doctrine and the common law drip easement cases must be consulted directly. Both dictionaries treat the term descriptively rather than analytically, which reflects its status as a received civil law category rather than an actively litigated doctrine by the time these dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
In Louisiana, this concept is governed by predial servitude doctrine under the Louisiana Civil Code and should be researched accordingly. In common law jurisdictions, the functional equivalent is the easement of drip or eaves drip, and courts will apply standard easement analysis. The civil law label is unlikely to appear in any modern pleading or opinion outside a historical quotation.