2026-07-24 · Delaware · Courts

Delaware associations frequently maintain and control common facilities that their recorded documents never actually conveyed to them. The Delaware Supreme Court affirmed on April 11, 2025 that decades of open, exclusive use can fix that — a civic association kept two concrete boat ramps that sat, on paper, on somebody else's lots.

Dippolito v. Swann Keys Civic Association was decided in the Court of Chancery on December 30, 2022 by Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock III, C.A. No. 2021-0614-SG, and affirmed by the Supreme Court (No. 415, 2024) on the basis of that opinion, Justice Griffiths writing with Justices Traynor and LeGrow.¹²

The title gap

A court-approved settlement in 1985 vested the Swann Keys common areas — including two concrete boat ramps — in the association.

The title documents filed afterwards omitted the ramps, which sit on portions of adjoining lots.

Decades later the adjacent lot owners discovered their paper claim and physically blocked the ramps.

What the court held

Title to the land under both ramps was quieted in the association as common-use areas, by adverse possession and by prescriptive easement.

The findings that produced that result: open, notorious and exclusive use by the association and its members for the prescriptive period, with no assertion of ownership or control by the record owners during it.

Counterclaims were dismissed, except a nuisance claim the court reserved. The association bore the respondents' fees on its own post-trial motion to amend.

1. Dippolito v. Swann Keys Civic Association, C.A. No. 2021-0614-SG (Del. Ch. Dec. 30, 2022) (Glasscock, V.C.) ↩
2. Dippolito v. Swann Keys Civic Association, No. 415, 2024 (Del. Apr. 11, 2025) (Griffiths, J.) — affirmed on the basis of the Court of Chancery opinion ↩