Definition
A license or right to cut down, remove, and use standing timber on a specified estate or tract of land. Wood leave is a form of limited property interest in timber — not an ownership interest in the land itself, but a granted right to enter, harvest, and take away trees. It is typically created by express grant or reservation in a deed or conveyance and runs against the owner of the land on which the timber stands.
The right may be limited in scope (to particular trees, species, or acreage), in duration (tied to a transaction or fixed term), or in purpose (commercial harvest versus personal use). Where the right is broadly granted, it may resemble a profit à prendre — the common law interest that permits a party to enter another's land and take a natural resource from it.
Why It Matters in Research
Wood leave is an archaic term rarely encountered in modern property law, where the same rights are typically described as timber rights, cutting rights, or profit à prendre. Researchers working with older deeds, land grants, or conveyancing records — particularly from New Jersey, New England, and the mid-Atlantic states — may encounter it in instrument language from the nineteenth century and earlier.
The practical trap: modern keyword searches will miss the underlying substance. A deed granting "wood leave" conveys what a modern drafter would call a timber easement or profit, but the term itself does not appear in most modern property indices. Researchers analyzing chain-of-title issues, encumbrances, or competing claims to standing timber in historical documents must look for the term explicitly and understand it as functionally equivalent to these modern categories.
The single case citation in Black's — Osborne v. O'Reilly, 42 N.J. Eq. 467 — is a real point of entry for understanding how courts interpreted the scope and limitations of wood leave grants in equity. New Jersey equity courts were particularly active in resolving disputes over limited interests in land, and that jurisdiction is a useful starting point for nineteenth-century doctrine on the subject.
Do not confuse wood leave with timber easements created by statute in modern forestry law; those are creatures of a different regulatory regime entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only direct treatment in the Law Mind historical dictionary shelf. The definition is brief but precise: a license or right to cut down, remove, and use standing timber on a given estate. The citation to Osborne v. O'Reilly grounds the term in New Jersey equity practice and suggests that by the time Black's was compiled, the term was already sufficiently specialized to require judicial gloss.
Historical sources do not extensively debate the contours of wood leave, and Black's does not distinguish between a bare license (revocable) and a true property interest (not revocable at will). That distinction matters: courts interpreting older instruments may have had to determine whether a wood leave was a mere personal license or a profit running with the land. The dictionary entry leaves this unresolved, and researchers should approach historical instruments with that ambiguity in mind.
No treatment appears in standard common-law treatises on real property within the Law Mind corpus beyond this entry, suggesting the term was regionally concentrated and largely subsumed into the broader category of profits à prendre as property doctrine consolidated.
Jurisdictional Note
Wood leave appears most frequently in older legal instruments from the northeastern United States, particularly New Jersey. Its precise legal character — license versus profit — may have varied by jurisdiction and by the specific language of the grant. Researchers encountering the term in instruments from other jurisdictions should analyze it against local common law governing profits à prendre and timber rights.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The matching encyclopedia entries (employment leave law and garden leave clauses) are not relevant to wood leave, which is a property and land use concept. No encyclopedia cross-reference applies.