A quiet title action without the claimant quiets nothing
A quiet title action without the claimant quiets nothing
2026-09-15 · New Hampshire · Courts
What happened. On August 14, 2026 the New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed in Laris, Trustee v. Weglarz, Trustee, No. 2024-0391, on appeal from Strafford County Superior Court.1
Status caveat, up front. This is a three-judge order, not an opinion. It is non-precedential and carries no public-domain citation. It is guidance about how the Court approaches the question, not binding law, and we could not obtain the order itself — New Hampshire does not post these orders in a reachable index. What follows comes from a New Hampshire real estate firm's write-up, with the docket and court of origin independently confirmed against the Court's case acceptance list.
The facts, as reported
Durham properties between Route 4 and Little Bay, all deriving from a tract once owned by a common predecessor who retained a strip between two parcels that functioned as a right-of-way to the bay.
Neighbours — knowing that an owner claimed easement rights over the strip — filed a quiet-title action without naming her, obtaining an order granting them fee simple and effectively extinguishing her claim. She succeeded in having that order revised to preserve her claim, then brought a separate suit.
What the Court affirmed
The superior court found for the easement holder after trial, and the Supreme Court affirmed. Because the prior owners had conveyed adjoining property using the right-of-way as a boundary, that conveyance carried at least a presumed grant of an easement, and successors are estopped by deed from denying it.
The Court declined two invitations to narrow the doctrine. It refused to require proof that the plaintiff personally relied on the deed language. And it rejected the argument that estoppel by deed applies only where the private way runs parallel to, rather than perpendicular to, the conveyed property. Historical plans and surveys conflicting with the governing deeds were held unreliable.
The fee award, and the limit the Court put on it
This is the part with the most practical content.
The superior court awarded attorney's fees based on the neighbours' conduct in pursuing the earlier quiet-title action to extinguish the easement. On reconsideration it narrowed the award to the cost of having to commence the separate suit — not the broader cost of litigating the easement, which would have been incurred anyway.
The Supreme Court upheld that limited award, on both the appeal and the cross-appeal.
The principle, stated at category level: New Hampshire courts will shift fees for litigation conduct of this kind, and they will trim the award to the increment the misconduct actually caused. A party that behaves badly does not thereby become liable for the whole case; it becomes liable for the extra work its behaviour created.
What this means for a New Hampshire association
Two things, and the first is a warning.
Do not clean up your title without joining the people who claim against it. An association with an ambiguous easement, an old right-of-way across common land, or a disputed access strip is exactly the party tempted to file a quiet-title action and get a clean decree. If a known claimant is left out, the decree is unreliable as against that claimant — and the attempt itself can generate fee exposure.
The temptation is real because joining a claimant means litigating against them, which is slower and more expensive than a default decree. This order is the reason the shortcut does not work.
Boundary-call easements are durable. Where a deed in the chain describes a conveyance by reference to a private way, the presumption of an easement in that way travels with the land and binds successors. An association buying, selling or reconfiguring land that touches an old way should assume the way carries rights until the chain says otherwise.
Note how this dovetails with the precedential decision in Martin v. Far Echo Harbor Club, 2026 N.H. 9, decided six months earlier: there the Court held that a deed referencing a subdivision plan implies an easement in the roads shown on it, "as a matter of law," and that "the grantor, and all claiming under him, are estopped by deed from denying such an easement exists." Same doctrine, arrived at from a different direction.
Why the non-precedential status matters, and how much
A three-judge order cannot be cited as controlling authority in New Hampshire. It is not law.
What it is worth is predictive. A board deciding whether to spend association money on a quiet-title strategy is making a forecast, and a recent order from the same Court refusing to narrow estoppel by deed and upholding fees against the party that tried is a relevant input into that forecast, whatever its formal weight.
What to watch next
Whether the Court takes a similar question in a published opinion. Estoppel by deed in private-way cases has now come up twice in six months — once precedentially in Martin, once not — which suggests the issue is being litigated in New Hampshire more than the published record shows.
A second non-precedential order from the window is worth pairing with this one: in Spain v. Bowles, decided June 24, 2025, the Court affirmed that where lot owners hold the fee beneath a private road, a road-maintenance association's agreement governs upkeep rather than ownership, so an owner may bring a trespass action without an association vote, and 1989 planning board minutes are not the equivalent of a grant.2
Related New Hampshire HOA Topics
- Alfano Law Office, “The Quiet Title Action That Didn't Quiet the Easement” (Sept. 7, 2026), reporting Laris v. Weglarz, No. 2024-0391 (N.H. Aug. 14, 2026) (non-precedential order) ↩
- Alfano Law Office, “Who Can Enforce Trespass Rights on a Private Road? The Fee Owner, Says the NH Supreme Court” (July 21, 2025), reporting Spain v. Bowles (N.H. June 24, 2025) (non-precedential order) ↩
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