Mayor of Baltimore v. Fairfield Improvement Co.

Citations

• 87 Md. 352
• 39 A. 1081
• 1898 Md. LEXIS 138

Syllabus

<p>Nuisance—Public Nuisance Authorised by the Legislature—Pest Houses—Leprosy—Injury to Pt'ivate Property—Coming to a Nuisance—Abandonment of Hospital for Contagious Diseases— Prescriptive Right to Maintain Private Nuisance—Injunction.</p> <p>The Legislature may, in the exercise of its police power, authorize a municipal corporation to do an act, which if done without such authority would be a public nuisance, and the act so done consequently furnishes no ground for civil or criminal proceedings at the instance of the State. But the right of an individual to complain of special injury suffered by him in consequence of such act is not generally impaired by a general grant of power.</p> <p>The authority given by statute to a municipal corporation to establish both within and beyond the city limits hospitals and pest-houses for the treatment of contagious and infectious diseases does not of itself authorize the corporation to establish a pest-house in a locality where it would be a nuisance, exposing other persons to contagion, or relieve the municipality from all liability for injury to adjoining property.</p> <p>There can be no prescriptive right to maintain a public nuisance, but there may be such right to maintain a private nuisance.</p> <p>If a pest-house established by a municipal corporation under legislative authority is not a nuisance when erected, because placed in a secluded locality, persons who afterwards locate near it are not, if injured by its subsequent use, debarred of redress, merely because they have chosen to reside in that vicinity, provided the right to maintain the pest-house has not become indefeasible by prescription.</p> <p>Whether the danger to contagion from leprosy be great or little, the disease is universally regarded with horror, and the placing of a person afflicted with leprosy in charge of a laborer and his wife in a settled community, without any means of restraint and confinement, is a nuisance calculated to do serious injury to pr