A legal right to use someone else's land for a defined purpose, without owning it.
An easement is a right to use land that belongs to someone else for a specific purpose - a driveway crossing a neighbour's parcel to reach a road, a utility company's right to run and maintain lines, a right of access to a shared water source. It is a property right, not a favour: it usually survives a sale and binds whoever owns the land next, which is precisely why it matters at closing.
Easements arise in several ways, and not all of them involve anyone signing anything. Most are created expressly, in a deed or a written agreement, and recorded. Others can arise from long-standing use, or by necessity where a parcel would otherwise have no access at all. The ones that were never written down are the ones that produce litigation, because their existence and their scope are both arguable.
Scope is usually the real dispute rather than existence. An easement for access is not automatically an easement to widen, pave, park on, or run utilities through, and who must maintain and repair the burdened strip is a question the original grant often simply does not answer.
The moment worth advice is before buying, not after a dispute. A title search surfaces recorded easements; unrecorded ones based on long use may not appear, and a survey plus a walk of the boundary is what catches those. Afterwards the questions become factual and expensive, and neighbours who have used a strip of land for years rarely stop because someone produced a deed.
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