Definition
Shanties, in legal usage, refers to a category of informal, modest, or secondary structures on conveyed land — including not only crude dwellings but also appurtenant outbuildings such as smoke-houses, privies, stables, and woodhouses. The term has appeared in deed covenants as a restriction on the type of construction a grantee may erect, and courts have interpreted its scope broadly to include accessory structures associated with rough or utilitarian construction, not merely the principal dwelling.
The term entered legal analysis primarily through covenant interpretation: what structures fall within a deed's prohibition against erecting "shanties" on conveyed land? Courts have held that double-boxed buildings of modest dimension — such as a structure 30 by 15 feet with an ell attachment — together with associated outbuildings, qualify as shanties within the meaning of such a covenant.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of shanty — simple, crudely built dwellings or shacks, often associated with poverty or impermanence.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A small, mean dwelling; a rough, hastily built cabin or hut.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is one of scope rather than character. In ordinary usage, shanties suggests the primary dwelling itself — the shack or hut a person lives in. In legal usage, as developed through covenant interpretation, the term extends to the full complement of auxiliary structures that accompany such a dwelling: outbuildings, privies, stables, woodhouses, and similar appurtenances. A researcher relying only on the common meaning would underestimate how broadly courts have construed deed restrictions using this term.
Common Confusion
Shanties should not be conflated with nuisance structures or substandard housing as defined by building codes and municipal ordinances. Those regulatory frameworks turn on specific statutory definitions of habitability and safety. A covenant against shanties is a private land use restriction interpreted through contract and deed law, not a public regulatory standard. The two may overlap in practical effect but operate through entirely different legal mechanisms.
Why It Matters in Research
This term matters almost exclusively in the context of deed covenant interpretation, and its significance is narrow but precise. Researchers working with historical property records — particularly deeds from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — will encounter "shanties" (and variant spellings, including the apparent typographic variant "shantics" noted in Bouvier's) as a term of restriction in conveyancing instruments.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
Spelling variation is real. Bouvier's source case references "shantics" as the spelling appearing in the actual deed, with "shanties" as the operative interpretive term. Researchers searching deed records or early case reporters should account for phonetic and transcription variants.
The term is historically situated. Modern deed restrictions and zoning ordinances use precise regulatory language. Encountering "shanties" as a covenant term signals a document of considerable age, and the interpretive framework applicable to it is that of nineteenth and early twentieth century covenant law — not modern land use regulation.
Corpus connections run primarily through property law sources: deed books, title abstracts, early state court reporters, and treatises on conveyancing and covenant interpretation. The term does not appear with any frequency in criminal, commercial, or procedural sources.
The breadth of the term's legal interpretation — covering not just dwellings but all associated outbuildings — means that a violation of such a covenant could be found even where no habitable structure was erected, if accessory structures of the type associated with shanty construction were built. This is the key practical point for any researcher reconstructing a historical property dispute.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is characteristically terse: a single case-derived definition built around a specific fact pattern. Bouvier's identifies the relevant structural characteristics (double-boxed construction, modest dimensions, ell attachments, appurtenant outbuildings) and anchors the definition to judicial application rather than abstract description. This is useful as far as it goes, but it reflects a single jurisdiction's reading of a single covenant term at a single point in time.
What historical dictionaries do not provide here is any survey of how different jurisdictions or different time periods construed the term. Shanties was a colloquial word pressed into legal service through covenant drafting, and its meaning in any given deed depended heavily on local usage and context. Researchers should not assume the Bouvier's entry represents a universal standard — it represents one court's interpretive move, preserved in a legal dictionary as illustrative rather than authoritative.
Jurisdictional Note
No consistent interstate standard governs the meaning of shanties in deed covenants. Interpretation depends on the governing state's covenant law and, more specifically, on the surrounding language and evident purpose of the deed in question. Historical sources from one state's courts should not be imported uncritically into disputes governed by another state's law.