Harvard Law Review Published monthly, during the Academic Year, by Harvard Law Students SUBSCRIPTION PRICE. S2.60 PER ANNUM 35 CENTS PER NUMBER Editorial Board George E. Osborne, President Charles M. Thorp, Jr., Note Editor Harold J. Laski, Book Review Editor Carl H. Baesler Maurice Klein Joseph Davis Cloyd Laporte Isaac B. Halpern Victor Levine Harold W. Holt H. Wm. Radovsky Henry H. Hoppe Clarence J. Young Equitable Servitudes in Chattels. — May agreements of a re- strictive character be made to run with chattels in equity as well as with land? In Werderman v. Societe Generate d'Electricite ^ the Court of Appeal thought that the burden of an agreement made upon sale of a patent would run with the patent as against subsequent purchasers with notice. The whole argument of Jessell, M. R., proceeds on the lines of Tulk V. Moxhay ^ and assumes the possibility of an equitable servitude in a patent.^ But the Court of Appeal subsequently considered the Werderman case to be applicable only where the agreement imposes a charge or encumbrance.'* And the general course of English decision since the Werderman case has served to cast doubt upon the possibility of creating equitable servitudes in chattels. It should be observed, however, that the Werderman case involved, not an agreement re- stricting the use of the patent, but an agreement binding the holder of it to pay money to the vendor. Such agreements would not create servitudes in the case of land ^ and a fortiori should not do so in the case 1 19 Ch. D. 246. 2 2 Phil. 774. Thus Jessel, M. R., says: "It is a part of the bargain that the patent shall be worked in a particular way and the profits be disposed of in a particular way and no one taking with notice of that bargain can avoid the hability." (19 Ch. D. 246, 252.) Again: "How ... it can be argued in a Court of Equity that an assign can take the patent with notice of that arrangement and keep all the profits for himself, I am at a loss to understand." {Id., 253.)
- "I think it is tolerably plain that the parties intended certain liabilities to attach
to the patent itself." {Id., 251.)
- Bagot Pneumatic Tyre Co. v. Clipper Pneumatic Tyre Co., [1902] i Ch. 146.
' Haywood v. Building Society, 8 Q. B. D. 403; Smith v. Colboume, [1914] 2 Ch. 533; Miller v. Clary, 210 N. Y. 127; 103 N. E. 1114. The party wall cases and their analogues {e.g., Whittenton v. Staples, 164 Mass. 319, and cases cited on page 327), where covenantee is given an easement to maintain something in part on covenantor's land and the latter covenants to pay his proportion of the cost if and when he uses it, may be explained, as has often been observed, on a theory of preventing unjust en- richment by imposing a charge upon the thing in case it is used, without resorting to
