2026-09-10 · Alabama · Courts

The doctrine that decides most Alabama covenant fights may be sitting on the wrong side of the courtroom, and a member of the Supreme Court of Alabama has now said so out loud.

On December 19, 2025 the court decided Dendy v. Ryan, No. SC-2025-0024, affirming a Marshall Circuit Court injunction in favour of the Architectural Committee of the River Pointe Subdivision near Guntersville.¹ Chief Justice Stewart and Justices Shaw, Wise, Mendheim, Cook and McCool concurred; Justice Sellers concurred in the result. Justice Parker concurred specially, and his separate writing is the part practitioners will remember.

What the court decided

Michael Dendy and Dendy Investment Group built on Lots 7 and 8 without a permit, departed from the plans the architectural committee had approved, and violated Guntersville building codes. The trial court ordered them to obtain approval or remove the unapproved structures.

On appeal the Dendy defendants argued the trial court should have applied the relative-hardship test — the equitable doctrine under which a court may refuse to enforce a restrictive covenant by injunction where the harm to the burdened owner “would be considerably disproportionate to the benefit received by the landowner seeking enforcement.”

The court agreed they had preserved it. Because they raised the defense before trial without objection, “the issues to be tried were expanded to include the applicability of the relative-hardship test.” But preserving a defense is not the same as being allowed to use it.

The trial court had declined to apply the test on clean-hands grounds, and the Supreme Court held that was within its discretion. The evidence supporting that conclusion came from Dendy himself: he testified, as the trial court's judgment recorded, that his position was that he could obtain the committee's approval for one construction plan and instead build something entirely different. That, the court said, “supports a conclusion that his motive was to purposely and willfully violate the River Pointe covenants” — conduct rising to “willful misconduct that was morally reprehensible as to known facts.”

The court drew the contrast explicitly with Englund v. Dauphin Island Property Owners Association, decided four months earlier, where the same court found no such evidence and reversed an injunction against homeowners who had built past a setback.

1. Dendy v. Ryan, No. SC-2025-0024 (Ala. Dec. 19, 2025) (slip op., with Parker, J., concurring specially) ↩
2. Englund v. Dauphin Island Prop. Owners Ass'n, Nos. SC-2024-0414, SC-2024-0437 (Ala. Aug. 29, 2025) (slip op.) ↩
3. Austin Brook & Austin Park Prop. Owners Ass'n v. Nabors, No. CL-2025-0515 (Ala. Civ. App. June 5, 2026) (slip op.) ↩