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Comment by unglaublich | Hacker News Reader

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Lots of endowments come with strings attached. We made a charitable donation to a local university for them to buy some specific science outreach equipment, they bought it.

This all seems reasonable to me. If you want my money or things, you’ll have to use them like I suggest.

To a reasonable extent, including this case, yes.

But there are limits - with finite resources like land, the present-day owners should not be subject to the whims of men who've been dead for 150+ years.

If in my great-great-great-grandfather's day he wanted part of his legacy to be land passed to his son who'd pass it on to his son and so on - that shouldn't stop me passing it on to my daughter.

And they end up in court cases where the people using it contrary go in with an argument like, "we really need it" or "we already spent it". Depending on how connected they are versus the person who has already passed, they frequently win.

If you don't want to abide by the conditions of a gift - don't accept it.

That's an ignorant simplification of how property ownership works. For example, defeasible estates are not a new or rare thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeasible_estate

Granting land conditionally such that the ownership reverts once the condition stops being met is very much a thing. I can't find the full details of this particular case, but it sounds like the property went through a long sequences of transfers that probably make the legal situation tricky.

The intent was to gift a park.

Why can’t gifts have contracts?

They can, but if the legal entity on the other end of the contract is a breathing person who has deceased, who has standing to enforce it?

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