Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

smh.com.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 222 posts

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#21

Post by carlob »

azernik wrote: post #11

Note that in a common law system, this would be thrown out of court under either "acquiescence" (if you don't raise a fuss for a very long time when someone unknowingly infringes your rights, you can lose those rights), or "laches" (if you wait long enough to make a legal claim that the defendant is injured by e.g. having made economic decisions in ignorance of that claim). Not sure about the equivalent Italian law,…

> Not sure about the equivalent Italian law, but I would be deeply surprised if there isn't something similar.

It's actually in the constitution: hereditary titles are no longer recognized.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#22

Post by sonthonax »

LatteLazy wrote: post #10

When my brother bought his house (UK, built in the early 2000s), we had to buy insurance against the local church needing a new roof. The residents of the area were responsible for local church upkepe because of a medieval edict. It was only about £40 luckily...

That insurance is still a tax, but a really old fashioned one, where private tax farmers collect and administer the treasury rather than the state.

That £40 must actually cover the costs of the local church's roof.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#23

Post by toyg »

pmlnr wrote: post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

Even without going archaic, I had to take insurance when I bought a terrace, because a lease existed on the land at some point but the owning company had dissolved years prior and no lease had been paid for a long time. This is very common in a country (UK) where the State has had strong continuity for several centuries, so land rights and entitlements can be tracked very far back.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#24

Post by toyg »

Joker_vD wrote: post #19
pjc50 wrote: post #7

Now wondering which European countries still have intact feudal law. Scotland abolished feudal tenure in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc... ; most of the feu burdens were abolished or explicitly ported across. England&Wales still retains the feudal system in places and occasionally people are hit by "chancel repair liability" or somesuch. The chivalric court still exists: https://en…

I suspect that none of the European countries to the eastern side of the Iron Curtain retained feudal law, or much of the "legacy" law in general. That, I guess, is one of the few potential upsides of any revolution: an opportunity arises to just throw away a lot of pre-existing arrangements and re-draw them anew in (hopefully) more sensible way. Of course, the quality of the new design and/or its implementation is n…

Big Rewrite, everyone!

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#25

Post by toyg »

Y_Y wrote: post #2

Maybe they should apply to the king of Italy for relief, since it is from his divine right to all the land that the fief is granted to his vassals.

I guess this is a joke about the continued claim of the Savoy house to a title that was abolished 75 years ago, and which was pretty tenuous to begin with (they're basically a French family, who effectively conquered the country in the XIX century by exploiting unification movements across the area - which were, ironically, ideologically republican, but had to accept the monarchy out of realpolitik).

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#26

Post by karatinversion »

tsimionescu wrote: post #16
Y_Y wrote: post #2

Maybe they should apply to the king of Italy for relief, since it is from his divine right to all the land that the fief is granted to his vassals.

I'm not sure that's true, the monarchy in Italy was relatively modern and short lived, preceded by a patchwork of republics with wonderful election systems. Here's an example of how the elections for Doxe de Venezia worked in the Republic of Venice[0]: > Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-f…

Not just republics - this particular claim descends through the short-lived King of Italy (which missed the age of absolutism by several centuries) from the Papal States.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#27

Post by michaelt »

pmlnr wrote: post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

Not if you brought the land since 2013: If the church hasn't registered the chancel repair liability in the land's title register, there's no liability. And very few churches registered, judging it a pretty big middle finger to your congregation.

Of course, there are plenty of scammers happy to charge you £50 for insurance against an impossibility...

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#28

Post by sneak »

pmlnr wrote: post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

> Leftover laws are weird things.

Fun fact: just like this old tax that the Italian residents are unhappy with, every single person that was old enough to vote for their representatives who then voted to ratify the income tax amendment in the USA is now dead. There is no one alive in the USA that was in any way represented in the vote for income tax; conversely everyone that is alive in the US today and is subject to it did not have any input into it: they were simply born into it, unrepresented, just as these Italians were.

There is a strong argument for all laws having an expiration date a few years past the expected lifespan of the youngest constituent of the represented population that passed it, otherwise we end up ruled primarily by those long dead, entirely unknown to us, as the laws pile up, amended in perpetuity but never aging out.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#30

Post by riccardomc »

azernik wrote: post #11

Note that in a common law system, this would be thrown out of court under either "acquiescence" (if you don't raise a fuss for a very long time when someone unknowingly infringes your rights, you can lose those rights), or "laches" (if you wait long enough to make a legal claim that the defendant is injured by e.g. having made economic decisions in ignorance of that claim). Not sure about the equivalent Italian law,…

The Roman law equivalent is Usucapione, still applicable in Italy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usucaption

Post reply on HN