Why an absence is worth reporting

A homeowner or a board asking “what does North Dakota law say about this?” is usually told to look at the cases. For community associations there are almost none, and knowing that changes how everything else reads.

The shelf is three cases deep. Carpenter (2025), Wachter Development v. Martin, 2019 ND 202, and Hill v. Lindner, 2009 ND 132, supply most of what North Dakota has said about covenant enforcement in the modern era. Carpenter itself quotes the other two for its governing principles — that covenants in planned unit developments “are vital to the existence and viability of such communities” and are “favored by definite public policy,” and that strict construction “will not be employed to defeat the obvious purpose of a restrictive covenant.”

The declaration is doing almost all the work. North Dakota has no general association statute, one new disclosure duty, and no recent case law filling the gaps. Whatever your governing documents say about notice, enforcement, fines, records or architectural authority is, in practice, the law of your community. Our North Dakota governing statute page sets out how little sits above it.

Out-of-state authority is persuasive at best. Carpenter illustrates the point: at ¶16 the court catalogued waiver factors from Texas and Nebraska decisions and then said it “has not adopted any specific list of factors.” A North Dakota board told that “courts hold” something should ask which courts.

Advice built on other states can be quietly wrong here. Much of the community-association guidance circulating online is written against Florida, Texas, Colorado or Nevada statutes that North Dakota simply does not have. The absence of North Dakota case law is what lets that material go unchallenged.

Two limits on the claim, stated plainly

First, three citation numbers in the April-to-September 2026 window — 2026 ND 108, 130 and 160 — did not appear on any retrieved release page. Most likely consolidated or reserved, but unaccounted for. Three unexamined numbers out of 91 does not change the picture; it is worth saying that they exist.

Second, this covers the North Dakota Supreme Court, and separately the Eighth Circuit, which did produce two association decisions in the period. It does not cover the United States District Court for the District of North Dakota, where the public opinion databases carry nothing filed since January 1, 2025. That is a gap in the databases, not evidence that nothing was decided. Nobody should claim there were no federal district decisions in North Dakota on this subject.

Where the action actually was

The community-association decisions that landed in this window came from the federal appeals court that sits over North Dakota, not from Bismarck. In September 2026 the Eighth Circuit held that an association is bound by an appraisal panel's dollar figure and cannot have it reviewed for adequacy. In November 2025 it revived a condominium owner's racketeering claims against his association over an unreleased lien. Both apply another state's substantive law, but both are binding circuit authority in North Dakota.

What to watch next

The obvious candidate for the next North Dakota association decision is the state's new resale disclosure statute, N.D.C.C. § 47-10-02.3, in force since August 1, 2025. It contains a buyer's right to void a purchase contract, an undefined “reasonable fee,” and a safe-harbour provision that cross-references the wrong subsection. Statutes with that profile tend to reach an appellate court within a few years of taking effect. Watch also for the remand in Tamm, which could finally settle whether a plat notation creates an easement.