Covenant
A written promise concerning land use that can bind successors if it touches and concerns the land.
The MBE’s favorite move is to make the remedy the tell: if the plaintiff sues for damages, run the strict at-law analysis, but if she wants an injunction, jump to equitable servitude and stop worrying about privity — testing whether you’ll wrongly deny relief for a missing horizontal-privity link. The hardest pattern attacks horizontal privity (the original promising parties must share a grantor-grantee or landlord-tenant relationship connected to the promise) — a covenant in a stand-alone “neighbor agreement” between two existing owners fails to run at law for want of it (note the Restatement (Third) abandons horizontal privity, but the MBE still tests the traditional rule).
Don’t confuse a covenant with an easement: an easement grants an affirmative right to use the servient land (creation by PING), whereas a covenant restricts how an owner uses his own land. And note the overlap with encumbrance — a recorded restrictive covenant is an encumbrance, so an undisclosed one breaches the deed’s covenant against encumbrances. Hook: covenants run on WITHN (Writing, Intent, Touch-and-concern, Horizontal/vertical privity, Notice); drop privity and you have a servitude.
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