The owner of a life estate must keep the building and fences in repair from ordinary waste, and must pay the taxes and other annual charges, and a just proportion of extraordinary assessments benefiting the whole inheritance.
S.D. Codified Laws § 43-8-2
Building and fences--Duty of life tenant to repair, and pay taxes and assessments
Applied in 3 court decisions — leading case In Re the Administration of the Florence Y. Wallbaum Revocable Living Trust Agreement (2012)
Most recently applied in In Re the Administration of the Florence Y. Wallbaum Revocable Living Trust Agreement (March 2012)
Source: CivC 1877, § 271; CL 1887, § 2787; RCivC 1903, § 294; RC 1919, § 364; SDC 1939, § 51.0710.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.