The heading of this chapter must look somewhat surprising to a common lawyer, who is not likely to see much affinity between a life estate and a right of way. But, for the Romans to whom the notion of a limited ownership was a contradiction in terms, the affinity is clear enough. Both these classes of rights, usufruct and its offshoots and what we call easements and profits, were rights in rem in the property vested in someone other than the owner. Both of them were iura, incorporeal rights. They were created in just the same ways. They were claimed and enforced by similar remedies. It is not therefore surprising that in the later Roman law they were classed together as servitudes, life interests (usufruct and the like) being personal servitudes, as attached to a particular person and dying with him, and our easements and profits being praedial servitudes, attached to the tenements they affected and of perpetual duration. But this is very different from the earlier conception.

Usufruct is not primitive. It dates only from late in the Republic and its primary purpose was essentially alimentary, e.g. provision for a widow. It is not till the Empire that it becomes a general legal institution, divorced from this alimentary purpose, and it is clear that the lawyers of the first century did not find it easy to analyse it and fit it into the scheme of legal things.