Courts usually follow the plain meaning of the language in land title documents. But courts routinely award rights of use to easement holders that are clearly not within the plain meaning of the allowed uses described by the easement.
When there is a dispute involving conflicting interpretations of the language in an easement, courts often apply a set of general principles to help them resolve the conflict and decide who wins and who loses. One common principle is that the language in the easement is interpreted in the way that favors the grantee, and against the grantor. The reason for doing this is straightforward: the grantor is the one who signed the document, not the grantee; the grantor therefore had an opportunity to review the document and insist that the language be just like she wanted it before he signed it. The grantee had no such opportunity. So according to the reasoning, if there is any ambiguity, it should be resolved in favor of the grantee.
This reasoning breaks down a bit in some cases such as mortgages, where the mortgagee is typically presenting the mortgagor with its pre-printed, form-based mortgage document, but for language that is drafted into an easement, if there is a genuinely ambiguous term in the easement, and the grantor and the grantee have a conflict because they have conflicting but reasonable interpretations of what kind of use of the land that the easement allows, the grantee is usually going to win.
Even after the grantor of the easement sells the property subject to the easement, and the new owner had nothing to do with creating any ambiguous language in the easement document, the easement language will be generally construed against him. The reasoning here could simply be thought of this way—the kinds of use of the land that an easement allows should remain constant when a property is conveyed to a new owner, which means that an easement shouldn’t be interpreted any differently just because there’ a new owner of the land.
But there’s limits to the extent that the grantee is favored when easements are interpreted. For example, if there really isn’t two reasonable interpretations of the language, but rather the easement pretty clearly means what the grantor is claiming it means, and the grantee’s interpretation of the language is a bit of a stretch, then a court may decide that the grantor should win because the easement plainly means what the grantor says it does.
Particularly in right-of-way easements, however, a court will ignore the plain meaning of an easement, and give the easement holder rights of use that are clearly not in the easement. Often this occurs when transport technology advances, and old modes of transportation described in an easement become obsolete; a court will allow use of the easement by the current equivalent mode of transport. So, easement language allowing use of a right of way by horse and buggy will typically now be interpreted to allow cars to use the right of way.
But easement language is often interpreted much more broadly than that. For example, the language involved in a Florida right of way easement dispute read as follows:
[The grantor] does hereby give and grant to the [grantee] a right-of-way for public road purposes and full authority to enter upon, construct and operate a road over and upon the following described lands…
A dispute occurred when the easement holder got permit to build utility poles and power lines on the easement, and then built the power lines. The land owner sued to get the utility poles torn down, arguing that the easement said nothing about allowing utility poles.
In its ruling on the case, the court admitted that a straightforward reading of the easement would confer the easement holder a right to construct and use a road on the easement and nothing else. But the court chose not to interpret the easement by the plain meaning of the words in it. Instead, the court allowed the utility poles to remain. The court explained:
The reasoning underlying this position is that electric, and telephone, lines supply communications and power which were in an earlier age provided through messengers and freight wagons traveling on public highways. So long as the lines are compatible with road traffic they are viewed simply as adaptations of traditional highway uses made because of changing technology. The easement [for a road therefore] includes every reasonable means for the transmission of intelligence, the conveyance of persons, and the transportation of commodities which the advance of civilization may render suitable for a highway.
It should also be noted that courts often interpret roadway easements to allow utility poles when the easement does not provide for them, even when the easement was created recently enough that utility poles were around. It has simply become customary in most jurisdictions to allow right of way easements to be used for power lines, communication lines, even water and sewer lines—pretty much anything that is convenient for the easement holder to connect with modern infrastructure that doesn’t interfere too much with the landowner’s use of the land.
Therefore, if a landowner is granting an easement for a right of way, and specifically doesn't want the easement to be used for power lines or other types of uses, they should make sure that the attorney drafting the deed explicitly prohibits those uses.