I loved this story about a dog owner and his fight against the condominium association. Typically, a state will have a Condominium Act that governs the various kinds of rules and restrictions a homeowners association can impose on owners of individual condominium units. Apparently this condo association had a rule prohibiting dogs over 12 pounds. Poor C.C., the Whippet/Lab mix featured in the story, reportedly weights about 30.
Condo association rules often rankle. Some prohibit such ordinary actions as parking your pickup truck in the driveway. Doonesbury once ridiculed widespread homeowners association efforts to restrict clotheslines. And the X-Files did an episode where homeowners who dared flout the authority of the homeowners association were done away with by the Slime Monster.
Condo association rules are a form of the efforts of property developers to impose a particular aesthetic look-and-feel to a neighborhood. Most ordinary single family homes have restrictive covenants on them, imposed by the developer, preventing you from building, say, an oil refinery on your residential lot. Your neighbor's lot has the same restriction, which you are probably happy to have. Other restrictive covenants are less benign. (For instance, racially restrictive covenants preventing non-Whites from living in White neighborhoods were in widespread use–were, in fact, encouraged and promoted by the federal government–until the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in 1948. Still, the racial segregation these covenants perpetuated contributes to continuing racial disparities in wealth and health.)
Two powerful legal themes intersect in this area. 1) People should be bound by what they agree to (corollary: you ought to read what you agree to). 2) People should be free to do as they please on their own property. Here, the fine print seems clear, and condo buyers are generally responsible to know the rules under which they are entering. On the other hand, there is usually a reasonableness test–the condo association can't make you pay your dues while kneeling in the direction of the waxing moon, even if the rules say so clearly. Also, this owner claims he was given a set of bylaws that clearly stated that he could own a dog, and making no mention of a weight restriction. Arguably he relied on this representation and they should not be able to enforce against him.
How you feel about this case probably depends on whether you are a pet owner. Do you imagine that the owner's relationship with C.C. is special, and somehow intrinsic to personhood and fundamental liberties? If so, you may feel they should no more be able to dictate how big a dog you can own than they can tell you what kind of music to listen to or how many children you can have. Or is owning C.C. just another in a long list of behaviors that your community is allowed to regulate? Then you probably think that this owner can no more keep C.C. than erect a billboard or store nuclear waste.
