The common law doctrine of waste protects remaindermen against tenants. Last month, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit wrote a useful opinion addressing a claim for common law waste arising out of a series of underground storage tank removals. Waste claims, especially claims that succeed, are reasonably rare, therefore Bitler Investment Venture II v. Marathon Petroleum, No. 12-3722 (7th Cir. Jan. 27, 2014), may provide occasion to consider waste.
Waste is an English common law doctrine that assures the owner of a reversion or remainder that a tenant—the owner of a life estate, a term of years, or some other period—will not unreasonably harm the remainder interest. For example, as Posner suggests in Bitler, if someone leases forest land for a term of years, he or she has an incentive to harvest timber during that term. If some of the trees will not mature until after the term, the tenant nevertheless may want to cut them down in order to sell the immature timber, leaving the owner of the reversion with no timber at all.
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