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Anglo-American jurisprudence: express private agreements and nuisance law to police land use. <br />Private land use agreements typically contained prescriptions on actions related to land or placed <br />affirmative duties upon the parties in relation to their control or ownership of land, and were <br />usually seen in the form of easements or covenants which could be invoked in the event of a <br />breach.25 Nuisance law generally allowed persons to address harmful actions by neighbors or <br />others which were not covered by pre-existing agreements.26 These traditional land use control <br />mechanisms had significant limits, however, which became all too obvious in the dawn of the <br />twentieth century. <br />First, private land use agreements were not always in place before a problem arose and hence <br />could not be called upon to resolve such problems. Next, even though using nuisance law <br />required no prior agreement between the parties, there were some land uses which, while <br />objectionable to others, did not meet the traditional standard for nuisance.�' A nuisance occurs <br />when one landowner uses her land so as to unreasonably interfere with another landowner's use <br />and enjoyment of her land.28 The key is reasonableness, which varies from case to case and is <br />highly fact-specific. Uses that merely offend the aesthetic sensibilities of one party are not <br />necessarily nuisances, a limitation which often substantially reduced the potency of the nuisance <br />�s Michael D. Bayles, Principles of Law: A Normative Analysis 111-113 (1987). <br />26 William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century America <br />61-62 (1996); see also Bayles, supra note 25, at 235-236. <br />�' See e.g., Jesse Dukeminier & James E. Krier, Property 951-952 (2002) citing Elmer S. Forbes, <br />Rural and Suburban Housing, in Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Housing <br />(1912) (discussing the harms caused by the locating of Chinese laundries, garages, and other <br />unpleasantries near the expensive homes of wealthy landowners). <br />28 Bayles, supra note 25, at 235-236. <br />10 <br />