In case anyone was wondering about the $7.75 million clamed damages, the claim is that allowing corner-crossing would cause the ranch to lose 25% of its value, and the ranch is currently valued at $31.1 million. Details: https://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/wyoming/article_a519...
(I'm not justifying this claim, of course, just providing information in case anyone was wondering where the number came from.)
Edit: the number came from a real estate agent acting as an expert witness, who said he would drop the value by 25% or 30%; it's not a mathematical/geometrical argument.
The horrific reason for this figure is that owning a square in this ridiculous checkerboard is equivalent to owning 1/4 stake in the squares of public land that it's adjacent to. If you own four black squares on the checkerboard on all sides of a single white square, you also own the white square, because you are the only person who can legally pass through onto the public land.
By citing this figure, the plaintiffs are essentially admitting that they are claiming de facto ownership over the public's land.
With that logic it doesn't seem like the hunters are liable for the damages? The hunters aren't the ones deciding if corner-crossing is allowed.
Even the court seems faultless here. It's not re-zoning their land, it's clarifying a law that already existed. The owner had an incorrect pre-ruling valuation.
This case is especially crazy cause the landowners sued the hunters: if they hadn't sued there wouldn't have been any damages, maybe they should sue themselves!
That seems incredibly weird as an argument. Either corner crossing is illegal, in which case the loss would be the actual value, or corner crossing is legal, in which case no damage was done and the private land was just overvalued. I’m not a lawyer, but I cannot fathom any situation in which the individual actions would be liable for having “caused” the decrease in value.
The owner, Fredric N Eshelman, and his lawyers by the way:
> “Do they realize how much money my boss has … and property?” Grende said.
https://wyofile.com/corner-crossing-video-do-they-realize-ho...
> Attorneys for Elk Mountain Ranch owner Fred Eshelman last week designated real estate agent James Rinehart of Laramie as an expert witness in Eshelman’s civil suit against the hunters
Nothing more credible than a local real estate agent being paid to serve as an expert witness by the prosecution team of a guy that owns a 22,045-acre ranch! He probably had a sniper dot on his forehead during the testimony.
I was wondering exactly that, thank you for elucidating.
Reading into it more than I should, it seems to me like what the plaintiff actually believed is that if people thought they could corner cross, it would reduce the value of the property, because it would mean that more people would be emboldened to do it. One group of ladder-bearing hunterrs wouldn't do it themselves, and without the right to cross his property being set in precedent, many groups probably avoided doing it for fear of being sued. The legal gray area dissuaded them. No more! This is one of those times when opening the box killed the cat.
Ironically by bringing the case and losing it he has lost that (entirely theoretical) $7.75M value as corner crossing, particularly his specific corners is now codified in law.
There is an element of self-referentiality here: the basis for the plaintiff's valuation only makes sense if, only if and after the plaintiff prevails.
I was very much wondering where that valuation came from, and this was the only rational explanation I could come up with. What causes me to scratch my head here is that the trespasser isn't the one causing that drop in valuation. It's the market perception that such trespassing is possible.
For example, if there was never a trespass on this property, but someone, somewhere else brought a similar case before the court and got the same ruling from a judge, I would expect the impact on the valuation of the property would be impacted in the same way.
It also seems a bit troublesome that the perceived valuation is driven by the owner's efforts to misrepresent the property. I could argue they should be charged with theft of $7.75 million, and are effectively suing people for reclaiming the stolen goods.
>"allowing corner-crossing would cause the ranch to lose 25% of its value"
Somebody should stop taking those shrooms.
For those out of the loop just as I was:
https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossi...
> What they had done was place an A-frame ladder across an intersection of property boundaries, the location where four parcels of land meet at a point. They climbed up one side of the ladder from public land, and down the other side of the ladder, stepping kitty-corner onto a different parcel of public land. But in doing so, their bodies also crossed through the airspace of the other two parcels meeting at that point, which were private. Their trial, set for mid-April, will decide if they trespassed when they passed through that private airspace.
This sounds so constructed, as if they wanted to provoke the precedent.
Both the method of "corner crossing" to access public land, and the use of a small ladder to get over a fence are common in the rural west.
First, there is important historic context: "checkerboard" land ownership, in which alternating PLSS squares are owned by private owners and the federal government, is very common in the west. It is a result of a subsidy/incentive scheme awarded to railroads, in which the railroad was given ownership of 50% of the land within a certain range (up to 40 miles) of the new railroad. This land ownership incentivized the railroad to develop both the route and services along with it, and because the federal government retained ownership of the other 50% it was assumed that the government would benefit from the resulting increase in property values. The way it has actually turned out is less than ideal; in many cases the federal government's squares are public land to this day while the railroad parcels have been sold to ranchers and other land-intensive operations. This results in a situation where vast acreages of public land are only accessible by corner-crossing at the intersections of this checkerboard.
Second, fences are put up mostly to keep cattle in, not people out. Where gate aren't installed, you could step over or through them, but with typical barbed wire construction that risks damaging the fence and pissing off a rancher. So on trails there are sometimes permanently fitted triangular ladders, and some people carry a ladder with them for this purpose.
The dispute over access to public lands that are near, behind, or otherwise restricted by private land is a long-simmering one in the west that is reaching a head. In many cases public roads pass through privately held ranches. It has long been common in some areas for ranchers to put up "no trespassing" signs on these roads, which must be ignored after confirming the road is public. There have been various incidents of landowners locking gates on public roads, but this isn't so common since it's pretty clearly illegal and usually you can get the sheriff to do something about it. The problem seems to have been getting acute though, and instances of people being run off of public roads and public land adjacent to private holdings seem to be increasing. At the same time, land owners are getting more strategic about acquiring land that fully encircles public parcels so that they can get exclusive access to them.
The root of this problem, as best I can tell, is the rise of the private game reserve. Many ranches have essentially been converted away from ranching operations (or at least they have been reduced to a secondary purpose) and now operate mainly as game reserves where people pay a good sum of money to hunt. This means that adjacent public lands are competition, both reducing the game inventory and providing alternative hunting destinations. So the owners of these game reserves have a great motivation to make public land around them inaccessible, and it's been difficult to organize against them since the BLM is not particularly interested in the problem.
There are definitely ways in which this is a selected case to test the issue, but the issue is not at all restricted to this case. Hunting organizations are looking for clear precedent that private land owners cannot restrict access to public land, land owners are looking for clear precedent that they can. Since this case has a very "clean" set of facts it's pretty attractive to both sides, as it'll be hard for a court to resolve without taking a stance on the broader issue of the legality of corner crossing.
In some areas there are fairly successful "open gate" programs that encourage ranchers to coordinate with state game authorities on providing access to public land that is in or behind their holdings. When the ranchers are mainly in the cattle business or farming, everyone can get along pretty well. There are disputes and there are ranchers that aggressively try to keep people out, but it's not so common. The big problem arises when the ranchers are primarily in the business of selling access to their land for hunting, in which case anyone hunting nearby who hasn't paid them becomes a problem in their eyes.
Weirdly I think this is not constructed, hunters are moderately heavy users of public lands and land rights are pretty important to that group. I believe they are entitled to enter public land and at the same time respect land right usage of private land owners, and the ladder is a discreet and harmless way to access public lands. The argument that they intersected the airspace of private land momentarily, with no damages, likely falls under accidental or unintentional violation.
That said, the goal is to access additional public land. I struggle to see how the supreme court will fall on the side of private landowners and might even punitively add that vehicular access to private land might be allowed in the future. Right now it's only "on foot". This ruling has an enormous body of evidence and research behind it, this isn't a small issue for a large number of people; they just don't overlap much with the HN community very much.
The plaintiff's complaint is so contrived that I almost wonder if it's all a setup to get this law overturned. No judge in their right mind would award anything close to the damages that they're asking for, and their argument in favor of the damages is the perfect illustration for how bad the law is:
> Eshelman asserts that when the men corner-crossed — stepping from one piece of public land to another at a four-corner intersection with his ranch — they damaged him by up to $7.75 million.
> That’s based on a 25% devaluation of the Elk Mountain Ranch, appraised at $31.1 million in 2017.
> Rinehart would discount the ranch by 30% if corner crossing was declared legal, he said in an affidavit. His figure would raise alleged damages to a total of $9.39 million.
So the argument essentially is "this law gives me de facto ownership of 25% more property than I actually own, and these guys trying to cross it somehow sets a precedent to set that land free". IANAL, but on the face of it that makes zero sense because two dudes breaking the law doesn't undo the law.
However, if they're not actually trying to win, this is a pretty solid argument to make if you're trying to persuade a judge to legalize corner crossing.
https://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/wyoming/article_a519...
Stupid question warning: This is absolutely an HN "hacking the law" type of question.
If an A-frame ladder can be used to cross an intersection of property boundaries, can the owners build a 30 meter high fence at the intersection to render the A-frame ladder obsolete?
And if it were built, what kind of legal challenge could be used against it?
How else are they supposed to cross from one corner to the other?
I've been in this exact situation elk hunting in Colorado. There was a section of public land with a herd of elk on it that my friend and I could have accessed via corner crossing in about 30 minutes that instead, due to very strategic parcels of land purchased by a rancher, blocked it off such that it was a multi-day hike to get there legally.
If I had a lawyer friend and some free time I'd have probably tried a ladder too.
How do hunters haul a deer over that little ladder?
Given that OnX makes its money off of facilitating access to recreational land, this report was surprisingly fair in describing land-owner concerns.
I am pretty strongly for access to public land, but even I could appreciate the concerns re: bad apples being encouraged by this particular case. That is, if you already have an issue with people illegally accessing your land, then opening the door for more people to attempt to access public land by passing through some mathematically precise point in space does in fact invite people who aren't so careful to cross near the corner. I've seen enough braided trails and "no motorized vehicle" signs busted and mashed into tire tracks to believe that concern. And the reality is that all it takes to do irreparable harm is 1 bad actor, because they can do so much damage.
All of that said, I think it's vitally important that western states do something to make it impossible to sue a trespasser for whatever loss of value you perceive when the public land you thought you locked up remains public.
I can see suing a trespasser for the cost of reclaiming a social trail that they happened to get caught on. But I cannot see suing a trespasser for 25% of the value of a $31M real estate transaction, because it turned out that a bogus legal theory about "owning" land that's not actually in the deed is, in fact, bogus. If the landowner can make a compelling case that the previous owner, or the facilitating real estate agents, convinced the new owner of that bogus theory, then sure, sue them for the lost "value". But not the guys who went out of their way to avoid causing any real (in the legal sense) damage.
The airspace rights have already been settled. Remaining at issue is waypoint 6 and if trespass did occur. Judge set the max judgment at $100.
Great ruling. The private/public checkerboard is pretty bizarre in the first place. A much more forethought approach would be to add a public buffer around everything (basically shrink the private plots by 6' or so).
Yeah. There should be implied easements around private land that borders public land.
You can do what you want as long as you do block passage between adjacent, or event reasonable nearby, public land.
The checkerboard makes sense in the 19th century context. Railroads were funded by land speculators, but the government doesn’t want to give them all the best land. Since public/private is a binary distinction, they halftoned the land, sharing the profits and producing the legal gray area we see today.
It would have been interesting if the west was divided into hexagons which tessellate perfectly and don't have this particular problem.
I am curious with the technology available at the time, how much either method would have increased the surveying time, accuracy, and other generally important parameters?
The keywords are "reasonable accommodation". E.g. in California if you have a property near a beach that completely blocks access, you have to provide a reasonable way to it.
And there's no need to shrink all the plots if there's a reasonable way already present.
Here's the story of those checkerboards - at least here in Oregon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_and_California_Railroad...
>(basically shrink the private plots by 6' or so)
Wouldn't chamfering the corners by 6' have the same effect?
The suit isn't about access. It's arguing (unsuccessfully, as it happens) that the checkerboard has created a de facto ownership pattern where large tracts are effectively private. So being forced to allow this "corner crossing" access into the interior of the ranch makes the property less valuable in aggregate and violates what I guess is a long-standing assumption in the real estate market.
I guess I don't much care, being neither a rural Wyoming property owner nor someone who wants access to all that public land in the checkerboard. But the net effect of this setup is that "big private ranches" are effectively illegal in Wyoming, and that strikes me as no less irrational than "you can't get to public land if it's surrounded".
> basically shrink the private plots by 6' or so
Might make sense where land is amazingly spacious (like wyoming in this case), but I wonder how that would work in other locales, say row houses, or manhattan or california lots which are measured in square feet...
Yes a public access easement should suffice, similar to how beaches are defied in some areas, waterways usually are. But how big is reasonable? Is it for vehicle access and/or larger equipment or only human sized objects?
This would basically necessitate moving every shared fence in the world.
Shrink them by 3m or 10%, whichever is greater.
It's bizarre to me that this is even an issue at all. How does the landowner justify millions of damage even if they had walked on his land? Is there no right to cross private property if that's the only reasonable way to reach public land? There should be.
If corner crossing is not possible, the value of his private property increases by the value of the notionally public land that's effectively exclusively his now. If corner crossing is allowed, then that value is stripped away and he "loses" millions.
Of course, this claim of damages collapses in a puff of logic when you point out that he never should have had exclusive access in the first place. Maybe he can sue the judge next?
It's ridiculous that this case got anywhere within the court system. Imagine a grown man angry that some other grown man stepped over a square-foot corner of his precious 22,045 acres of dirt to get onto some other area of dirt. This is like my brother and I arguing over who's hand was on who's side of the back seat of the car when we were pre-schoolers. How much time, money, and energy was wasted on this clowning?
Outside the US, there are even many jurisdictions which make this question of easements moot, by having general rights to roam.
It's a (selfish) issue for the landowner because previously they could treat this public land as if it was theirs effectively, since other people don't have access to it. This ruling doesn't change that for public land that doesn't share at least a corner with private property.
Usually the courts will decide in favor of the public's right to beach access. Here's one example: https://news.yahoo.com/venture-capitalist-khosla-loses-calif...
What's bonkers is how far down the list of comments I had to scroll before someone sane called this stuff out as batshit. Well done, sir.
I'm guessing along the lines of:
* Before hunters were corner cutting, the land was more desirable and I could have sold it for $X
* With hunters now corner cutting, the land is less desirable, due to the hunting activity, and can only be sold for $Y
* $X - $Y = $7 million
Every man deserves his day in court.
Is it me, or does anyone else find it frustrating that reporters reporting about some court case habitually cannot quote the exact ruling and link to PDF that people can read for themselves?
It's not like they didn't have the source material to base the story on, so why can't they pass that along to the reader in this day and age, to credit the source?
But no, apparently a retold story in someone else's words is better than being able to read the 50-page document that actually lays out the ruling..
Definitely! If you haven't found it yet, here's the link: https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
It's a pet peeve of mine too. I wish there was some kind of ethics in journalism law to cite known textual sources but that would likely run against the first amendment and be somewhat onerous a requirement to keep up to date as the links change.
News websites rarely link externally because they want you to stay on their site and don’t want to improve the SEO of other sites (which may be other news media).
To be fair, there are legitimate reasons too. Links can become invalid and they most likely don’t want to deal with the headache of fixing that/perceived UX issues of not fixing it. Even worse, linked content could be easily replaced with something… unsavory
News sites have their own sense of entitlement - that they’re entitled to your attention, and they definitely don’t want you clicking on a link to another site (unless it’s an add).
On a sidenode, in Germany, where land is much more sparse, there are usually trespassing rules. First, if a land (public or private) is inaccessible, there's usually a trespassing note added to the land register, marking where either the public or the other land owner is allowed to walk/drive/pass through. The owner of the trespassed land is not allowed to remove or block these e.g. driveways.
Then there is the other case of large agriculture or forest lands. Without a specific reason, you are not allowed as a land owner to close this off to the public. Forests are to be held accessible to the public (e.g. for nature recreation), even if you own them. Even for farm land with animals, it is usually accepted that people (hikers, mountainbike etc.) pass through these. In case of fences for animals, it is also generally accepted to climb over these (of course, you're responsible for damage either to the property or yourself*).
And a last anecdotal note: I have a friend who hikes with a group of 3-4 people every year based on (pretty) straight lines through Germany. They usually sleep on the ground (without tents) wherever they are when night comes. This is often on private land. Their experiences were almost all positive, land owners even come to bring them water, to talk etc. Some first watch curiously but are fine when the story is told.
* There's a strange ruling that you, as an owner, can be held liable for people hurting themselves on your ground, even when they're (e.g.) thieves trying to break into your property. I think this ruling is created to prevent land owners creating traps, where children can fall into holes etc.
> in Germany, where land is much more sparse
So, in Germany, there's less land per square mile?
I would be a terrible rich person, since I wouldn't care one whit about someone crossing "my airspace". Hell, I'd donate an acre to to the state at the corner just to let people cross. Fred Eshelman has a large fraction of a billion dollars at his disposal and has given away over $100 million dollars to UNC, just chalk this up as a donation and walk away.
The fact that you don't see the ability to buy land adjacent to public land and charge people money for access to the public land may be part of why you're not a rich person.
You could make it an experience. Pay to have an ornery rancher catch you & lock you up in an old timey jail with the iron bars. Have them locked up with a cattle rustler whose brother rips the window off the prison wall with a horse, then escape to go rob a train. The possibilities are endless.
I want to buy a fractal-shaped piece of land, that has zero area (thus should be cheap), but corner-locks the whole Earth.
I’ll do the same to you. Perhaps if everyone on earth does the same, we’ll have effective global right to roam (or else, we’ll all need to swim out to international waters).
I really wish we could pass a federal "right to roam" like they have in England.
Nobody should be the sole owner of a beach, lake, river, or mountain.
The most bizarre thing about this situation is that IT WAS ALWAYS ILLEGAL FOR THE LANDOWNER TO BLOCK LAND THIS WAY. Since 1885.
[https://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=23&page=322]
Yes, well, if we relied on settled and trivially obvious law to decide these things, what would Vinod Khosla do in his spare time?
Besides of course chasing beachgoers down the waterfront with his rake. [1, 2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/01/vinod-kh...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/08/califor...
I'm surprised landowners in Wyoming own the airspace above their land. Normally you are only allowed to control as much airspace as required for the ordinary enjoyment of your property (for buildings and such). https://law.justia.com/codes/wyoming/2019/title-10/chapter-4...
Steve Rinella of Meateater interviewed the hunters in this case on his podcast.
It is quite an entertaining listen - 1:03 is where he explains the background and 1:08 onwards is where the interview starts: https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-342-getting...
What is this claimed $7.5 million in damages by stepping over a corner of land about? The wooden beam from the photograph got scratched or something?
I assume they’re including the value of the public land that was ‘inaccessible’ (not actually inaccessible as we found out) as part of the ranch, which is a ridiculous notion that should’ve been summarily dismissed with prejudice so the plaintiff could not re-file or appeal the verdict, but this ruling is a good one.
US$7.75 million in damages for (rereads it) stepping on someones property? That's some next-level douchebaggery right there. It's a shame the lawyers involved won't get sanctioned for not telling their PoS client "that's not going to go over well"[1].
[1] "Any damages Eshelman would claim for that alleged transgression would be limited to “nominal damages” and not the $7.75 million Eshelman had claimed in lost ranch value, the judge wrote."
> US$7.75 million in damages for (rereads it) stepping on someones property?
Not even stepping on private property, just crossing through its airspace.
The claim is that allowing corner-crossing would cause the ranch to lose 25% of its value, and the ranch is currently valued at $31.1 million. Details: https://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/wyoming/article_a519...
(I'm not justifying this claim, of course, just providing information in case anyone was wondering where the number came from.)
The owner should pay millions in fines for illegally blocking access to public land for so many years.
The only explanation of why these inaccessible pieces of land I can find [0] fails to explain why they were created this way. Does anyone know?
Apparently to encourage railways railway builders were given every other square mile of land on each side of the railway. But that should only create 2 "rows" of checkers, each accessible either from above or below. The only way to create a full checkerboard would be to build multiple railways, in parallel, only 2 miles apart. I cannot believe people did that, so what am I missing here?
In case folks from outside the region are wondering how this situation came to be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)
This is bizarre.
I’m all for property rights but if you own a big chunk of land …. this seems less consequential than someone stepping off the sidewalk onto my lawn, or an out of control kid crashing their bike into my yard…
Anyone using the ladder in the photo seems VERY considerate.
Basically the issue for the owner here is the most valuable land is the mountain, which is wholly on the public portion. If corner crossing is allowed then he can't sell hunting rights to that mountain for as much because you can just go for free. But if corner crossing isn't allowed he can continue to use the public land while keeping everyone else off.
Swedes have this figured out. Never would work in America, but I’m all for it.
Link to article on original site https://wyofile.com/judge-rules-in-favor-of-corner-crossing-...
Link to judge's decision https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
This always seemed like a matter of wealth + intent meeting a law firm willing to make the argument rather than a viable legal theory.
I can't imagine that if this was a significant cost for the party filing the suit that they would have prosecuted it.
Given the wording of the law (even absent the recent subsequent laws) you can't claim privilege over public land like that.
If the ruling were any different it would have been terrible for the idea of public lands being for public use.
The law firm here was the DA
Refreshing that a bit of sanity prevailed. I’ve been mad about this for months.
For some reason, this domain is blocked by my ISP's illegal content filter.
So here is a mirror: https://archive.ph/vVoLH
So this means that, legally, private land is not a closed set (doesn't contain the points where boundaries touch).
The US needs a national right to roam.
I'm surprised there isn't a reasonable setback for fences abutting public lands like this
The land owner was an idiot to let this go to trial.
He'd been a lot richer if he constructed a private road and charged a toll. He'd have defacto control of who crosses and it'd be quite profitable too.
Instead he got caselaw against him and is left with nothing. Lesson about greed here!
There's a good chance the land owner already rents out access to the public land for quite a lot of money.
By allowing corner crossing, people willing to go the long way around can get to the public land for free.
Are we going to start seeing rounded corners on parcels now?
They will need to update the plat maps to use padding instead of just using margins. maybe start using box-sizing:content-box rather than border-box too? but, border-radius could be effective as well.
It probably should have been that way to begin with if you didn't buy either of the parcels that connect the two corner parcels
> The men corner-crossed in 2020 and 2021 to hunt public land enmeshed in Eshelman’s 22,045-acre ranch.
What sort of a sociopathic son of a bitch do you have to be to tie up so many resources on such a minor transgression? That dude eats babies for sure.
The sheer rapaciousness of these multi-hundred millionaires is just disgusting. I'm glad to see that public opinion is largely starting to turn against these billionaire types as "geniuses" to boils on the ass of humanity.
I'm sure most of us agree with you on the original issue here but please don't fulminate or call names on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You may not owe billionaire types better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
This is their worst nightmare. Some disgusting poors milling about their hundreds (thousands?) of acres
We can't handle less.
As a child you would scream if your toys were taken away. As adults we scream at the mere suggestion of something being taken away. It doesn't matter how rich you are. Some things never change.
This is why we get stuck in ridiculous local optima and just can't get out. Individuals, including those in government, might be able to see better long term solutions, but getting there often involves convincing people to lose something. Nobody seems to be willing or able to explain their long term strategy. Or perhaps nobody is willing to listen.
Start by being better than the people you hate. Campaign for strategies that involve short-term personal loss to get to better places.
Uck eah! his s uch a ig in or ublic ands!
:-) My bad! I'd fix it if there were a way.
Indeed, the actual buying of land in a checkerboard like this with this obvious intent is the most cynical, greedy thing, and I assume the only reason the government sold them the land in that pattern in the first place is because the rules allowing that were written by someone in the pocket of the folks looking to do this practice.
Actually, it's a lot older than that and seems to have been an honest mistake. From the ruling [0]:
> History and politics have complicated the pattern of land ownership in the West. To promote western expansion in the nineteenth century, the federal government encouraged the construction of rail lines through the West by granting every other 640-acre parcel along rail corridors to a railroad company. The hope was that the lands remaining with the government would increase in value as the companies built rail lines, which the government would later sell at high prices. The plan was successful further east, but the government struggled to sell the lands in the arid West. The result of this failed venture is the checkerboard pattern of public and private land that now plagues much of the West.
[0] https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
The property planning department must have been fans of Go.
Ah the board game.
Took me way to long to figure out this wasn’t a subtle HN-dig at golang.
If only Settlers of Catan had been around for longer, maybe our property planners wouldn't be in this mess.
A checkerboard pattern is a horrifically inefficient way to claim territory in go.
It might be useful to consider why checkerboards are good shape in legal systems, but bad shape in go. Also why the legal system rejected checkerboards after some thought, at least provisionally.
(historical rant: You might as well resign if your opponent is not also 30k. Who comes up with these analogies? People who have barely heard of the game, like 10ks or sth?)
Finally: yeah, Go is a bad analogy for this.
Our backyard backs onto a green space. The only way someone can get to the green space is to walk through our backyard or parachute in. Effectively our yard goes from 1/2 acre to 1 acre when including the green space. Basically we have taken ownership of it since only we can access it. It is definitely a selling point for the house.
What about the other 3 sides of the green space? Or does your backyard encircle it like an enclave?
Apparently not anymore because corner crossers have precedent.
How did these checkerboards come about? I've noticed them on maps before when looking for public land in the US.
Came about from the Land Ordinance of 1785 introduction of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) used by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management).
Office types gridded up manifest destiny using squares within squares and created a pre GPS coordinate system for coding up space (within central north america).
See (as starting points).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/do-us-topos-and-national-map-have-...
While I'm not from that part of the world I spent a few years writing interop transformations betwixt all manner of "coord systems" across the globe that predate WGS84 et al.
The PLSS grid explains the locations of many midwest US roads and townships, and "checkerboard ownership" (families | businesses buying land to surround other land and then deny access to land not paid for) was one form of early system gaming.
Railroad grants. The theory was that by granting land to railroads instead of money it incentivizes them to build the railroad well. By keeping half the land for the government the government profits from the increased value too. They just didn't think this far ahead.
It has to do with the way the federal government granted land to the railroads to incentivize them to lay track.
IIRC, it was a way to push settlers farther to the West.
Looked like a clever idea at the time, likely.
It is a bit easier with parcels that touch at corners, but that isn’t unique to using a checkerboard. With almost any way you cut land into parcels, people can surround a plot with land they own.
Also, this doesn’t require a single owner to own those black squares. It could also be four individual owners, each building a (virtual or physical) wall on the border of their land.
Because of that, I expect that any civilized country has laws that give land owners and their visitors the right to reach their land, so that they can benefit from owning it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_way)
There is some kind of hilarious circularity to this. It's almost comparable to founding a publicly-traded company which asserts that its principal source of profits will be shaking down doubters through the legal system, and then suing anyone who indeed expresses doubts for damages based on the expected loss in stock value if the company were to fail to bring or lose that very lawsuit.
(Is this an appropriate model for certain "reputation economy" actions that exist in many human societies, like duels over perceived slights to one party's physical prowess?)
By this logic of five squares, wouldn't that reduce the value by 20%
This ranch apparently consists of quite a few squares in a complicated pattern, but even if it were just the four it wouldn't end up being exactly 20% because you would have to factor in the partial ownership of every adjacent public square, not just the one you surround completely.
Not all land is of equal value. Having exclusive access to your own public area that is not going to be developed, could be that ammenity is worth a lot; further it makes the area effectively more contiguous. All is to say the sum can be worth more than the parts.
After admitting this, the judge should fine the landowner the $7 million he illegally tried to appropriate.
apparently you've never heard of an easement.
Like Go, but for landlords. ;-)
Near as I can tell, they’re trying to get the court to agree to a specific corrupt interpretation that essentially denies the federal laws power. Which is why it has gotten this far.
It's gotten this far because it would render a large amount of public land unreachable, and outdoor-related organizations not surprisingly care quite strongly about that.
You mean the landowners are liable for damages.
make any random argument in court and see what sticks.
What if it were determined that people crossing would increase it's value? The argument based on cities with higher density generally commanding higher price per sq. ft. If 10 million people cross it a year, then they would have billions of dollars worth of land.
There is a contested aspect if one of the defendants did trespass and listed the max judgment as $100. The $8M loss of value is such a joke.
That's Wyoming in a nutshell.
"Do you know how much money I have?"
"Yeah, but we still don't like you, and saying that makes us like you less."
It's a really weird mix of respect for wealth/property (when you're a good neighbor) and disrespect for wealth/property (when you're an asshole).
E.g. see what happens when a millionaire pisses off the fishing community by ignoring laws and harming river habitat
I mean it definitely was enough money to convince the county to prosecute after being prodded by the private land owner.
Apparently he was right about money being important:
> Officers said they would submit reports to the county attorney who, documents say, subsequently ordered a deputy to charge the men, which happened on Oct. 4.
Meanwhile we are being told, even on this forum, that income inequality is no big thing and one shouldn't be envious, it's unseemly. Where is the revolution?
Did you miss the part where having all of that land and money didn’t let him get his way?
> In the video, Bakken and Miller tell Grende, who had called to report the four hunters were trespassing by “corner crossing,” they would not cite the men for either trespassing to hunt or criminal trespass
They also lost in court. It was a ranch manager trying to intimidate people with wealth, and it didn’t work.
Given that this forum skews toward the winning side of the income inequality game, its not really surprising to find that sentiment overrepresented here.
"Where is the revolution?"
You know of any revolutions that solve inequality? All the ones in known history simply change who the winners and losers are and maintain inequality.
Inequality absolutely exists and "revolutions" that claim to fix it in fact... don't. Socialism/Communism/etc all fail spectacularly to solve the "issue" of inequality.
It's worse than that. The ranch owner was essentially trying to lay claim to BLM property. If he is the only one with access, he has effectively stolen it from everyone else
Would be even funnier if the state brings eminent domain to seize a few square feet of land in each corner and build a little bridge that welcomes you across each corner. And pays market value for a few square feet of ranch land.
It is a reasonable conclusion, but that doesn't mean it's the Hunter's fault.
Interesting. Are there no easement laws in US? Here we have a law that means a landowner (in case of a public land a local council etc) can sue an owner of an adjacent plot to provide "an easement". An easement is essentially one or more of : right to pass on foot, or drive through, install services across his land (water/sewer pipe, electricity) etc. The court then decides if the claim is reasonable and if yes grants it while the landowner that has to provide the easement gets monetary compensation calculated in some standard way(taking into account neighboring sales to establish value etc).
On the surface it may seem this law infringes on private property rights(guaranteed by our constitution), but the spirit of it is to prevent infringement on enjoyment of one's property rights by being blocked by another landowner and there is no "precedents" in our legal system so each case is supposed to be decided on its merit and the judge's interpretation of the law alone.
Easements exist, but they are not automatic; they have to be created and assigned at the time the land is sold or granted, or purchased/created later.
Thank you very much for sharing your insights and knowledge. The case makes a lot more sense now to me.
Weirdly I think this is not constructed, hunters are moderately heavy users of public lands and land rights are pretty important to that group
Unless it's a hunting preserve (they do exist, plenty of buckhunting going on in Alabama) hunters are local and intensely aware of the power relationships. One really wishes to know: who is the guy with deep pockets that Eshelman upset and what are they beefing over, and how did he get the wholesome quartet of hunters to go along with him. The whole suit is about as organic as the Chatterley trial.
> One really wishes to know: who is the guy with deep pockets that Eshelman upset and what are they beefing over, and how did he get the wholesome quartet of hunters to go along with him.
What are you talking about? Access to public lands has been an ongoing fight for decades with people from the entire political spectrum having opinions about the matter. Whether that be rock climbers trying to access routes, or people who fish trying to access streams, to people like this who are trying to access public hunting land. Assuming that everyone trying to access public lands is some poor pleb is in bad taste. Companies like Patagonia have long supported more liberal access to public lands with millions in donations, as well as organizations like the NRA with their advocacy and financial support.
You should listen to the interview:
https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-342-getting...
around 1:10:00 the hunters talk about how they found this place.
I think you don't appreciate the hunter demographic and how much people will travel to enjoy the hobby. They're often not local, but frequently build relationships with the locals and landowners like you describe, and go back to the same places year after year.
Hunting preserves are increasingly common throughout the west and are mainly where these disputes arise. Some of the largest landholders in the west, for example Ted Turner, are mostly in the business of buying cattle ranches and converting them to hunting preserves.
I don't think this case is very constructed at all, as many similar disputes have played out in my region, but generally they don't make it to court... they end up either as hunters getting run off and not returning, or the BLM district supervisor sending nasty letters to get gates unlocked, or an argument mediated by the sheriff where everyone leaves unhappy. What's unusual about this case is that it has a very clear and well-documented set of facts that makes it an almost ideal test case for the issue of corner crossing, and both public land advocates (which range from the owner of OnX who is involved in this case to many other political lobbying organizations) and landowners looking to retain the ability to restrict access to their adjacent public land stand to benefit. The well-documented set of facts here are not that surprising as this is a well-known issue in hunting circles and there are quite a few people who document their means of land access very carefully in order to defend themselves in a situation such as this.
No, that's just really what these "ranch" owners are like. I've been shot at on legally-accessed public land, escorted off legally accessed public land by private security, and had public roads blocked off all by overzealous asshat "ranchers" who think they own the public land. I'm going to be honest, it takes a great deal of restraint to be shot at (not seriously aimed at, just warning shots across the bow, but still terrifying) and not shoot back.
I put ranchers in quotes because these people roll in from Texas or California (or they're mega corps like Farmland Reserve LLC or the Gates Foundation), purchase a ranch or farmland, lay almost everyone off, shut down basically all active ranching (I believe this might be part of Gates's anti-global warming schtick), and then do nothing with the land beyond sell private elk hunts. And of course they don't want me shooting animals on the neighbouring public land, so they hotly contest those with signs, fences, gates, private security, etc.
The fine for blocking a public road in Montana is laughably small. Something like $50/day, which isn't even pennies for these people.
The fine for blocking a public road in Montana is laughably small. Something like $50/day, which isn't even pennies for these people.
Hat tip! I never knew about the strategy to deter access to public lands. I did a bit of Googling and found: Fines for failing to remove the encroachment would rise from $10 per day to $100-$500 per day.
Ref: https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/environment/lawma...Then following the link from the article, you can see the actual bill in Montana Legislature: https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billhtml/HB0486.htm
Finally: "Current Bill Progress: Became Law" here: http://laws.leg.mt.gov/legprd/LAW0203W$BSRV.ActionQuery?P_SE...
I'm very impressed so much information is available online from the legislature!
More details about what exactly defines "blocking": https://www.plwa.org/closing-a-rural-road
There is land throughout the west that encircles (or otherwise makes it difficult to access) public land that it borders that goes for obscene amounts of money for the very reason that it, defacto, has exclusive access to this land. This landowner purchased this land for that reason, and it was almost certainly marketed that way by the real estate listing.
You underestimate the sense of entitlement by these owners.
“My dad used to hunt some private property in Montana,” said Mr. Hettick, a forester with the U.S. Forest Service. “And one year they told us, ‘Sorry, you can’t anymore — we leased it to an outfitter.’ I was crushed. And I was like, you know what? This is never going to happen to me again.”
> However, if they're not actually trying to win,
Is it illegal to take a case to court with the intention to lose yet set precident?
I don't know about "illegal" but it seems the Case or Controversy Clause has bearing in that hypothetical. If no actual controversy exists between the parties - for example, if both sides have agreed on who is to win the case - then the courts generally don't like to issue a ruling.
Further, if a litigant fails to raise an issue while arguing a case, and the court therefore doesn't consider it, then the precedent doesn't necessarily control a future case where a litigant does raise that issue.
No, but that’s not what the rancher did. He tried to bully them using massive and inflated claimed damages, and it backfired.
No. And this is a common trick the government has used. Have a friendly party bring a suit and then refuse to defend effectively to force the judge to rule against. That’s how prop. 187 got nuked.
Answered here: 36171631
In summary: It is illegal in spirit to block access to federal public lands.
The ruling very intentionally says "on foot", which limits it to people walking across. Leaves the door open for future debate/interpretation about vehicular traffic. You might be able to design an offroad vehicle that can "step" across the boundary but by my (non-lawyer) reading this isn't covered by that.
By digging a tunnel, for instance
Just step across.
From reading the article, it appears that there was a fence (presumably intersecting sections of fence) that had to be overcome. Climbing the fences would be, nominally, stepping foot on those fenced properties. Using the ladder let them go over the corner boundary without actually having to step foot on the other two adjacent properties.
| Public
---+---
Public |
The fences belong to the private properties (if my understanding is correct) and the ladder lets them technically remain only, with regard to "setting foot", on the public properties.Which is also illegal, btw, due to terrible us laws around public land
They are supposed to pay the rancher a trespass fee to be allowed access to the public land through their property or hire a guide that has a commercial agreement with rancher that includes access to the public lands.
Or, they could just... ask. Never a guarantee, but still an option until this issue can be more clearly defined from a legal standpoint.
>“Last year, a couple of dads from Missoula and their sons showed up and asked me if they could hunt here. I told them to give me 15 minutes and I’d take them out with me. We got some really nice mule deer bucks for their sons, and they helped me work cattle the next day. We got some antelope for the dads the day after. So we had fun. One of them even bought beef from me this year.”
https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossi...
You were unsure if corner crossing was legal?
We were unfamiliar with the details of specific cases, but we had heard enough to know it wasn't something we wanted to try.
In pieces.
I think it is more important to make sure that people can access public land, than it is to protect the wealthy landowners who are using their multiple plots of private property to block access to public land.
These aren't poor innocent bystanders whose land is being ruined. It's wealthy people trying to steal access to our public property. Fuck them.
If there's no evidence that the trespasser is substantially responsible for the trail, suing them is ridiculous too.
Granted, but neither is it feasible to locate, much less pursue, every person who contributed to the social trail existing.
I'd recommend you read OnX's report. They provide two examples of how the land owner is being harmed, although only one of them ("Bad Apples") seems valid.
Ultimately, the concept of American exceptionalism (that is, the belief apparently held by every American that they, personally, justify an exception to the rules, but not anyone else) needs to die. That national myth is the greatest obstacle to a viable American implementation of e.g. the UK's freedom to roam. Until then, the land owner has (and should have) the right to protect their property.
Years ago (ca 2009), I was training for the Laramie Enduro (now known as the Laramie Range Epic) mountain bike race up around Happy Jack, about 90 miles east of the ranch that kicked off this whole thread, when I encountered a no-motorized-trail sign, snapped off at its base, pressed into the mud in tire tracks left by car- or truck-sized tires.
I've been skiing up in wilderness areas in the Snowy Range (that is, the range that Elk Mountain is the northern terminus of), and had to deal with junked up snow from snowmobiles. Now, damage to snow is sort of ephemeral, but damage to the underlying trail because there's insufficient snow coverage?
In either of these cases, what recourse does the land owner/manager have? Do our courts really just "whelp, sucks to be you"? I really get how a few bad actors can really mess up an area. Because of that, I really do believe that if the law came down very publicly like the hammer of god on a few of those bad actors, the ones with the rotten luck to get caught, then people in general would be better stewards of the land.
I think limiting damages to real damages (like trail mediation), and excluding legal fees, means that the would-be plaintiff, bringing a civil suit, should have to weigh whether or not the cost of a suit is worth winning the actual cost of removing a trail. If its 12 feet of trail near the corner, its not worth it.
I recall an incident in Colorado, in 2000, where a radio station told its listeners about an unofficial gathering of off-roaders. Several hundred people showed up in trucks and jeeps and things, drove off road on federal land to get to private land, then tore up 7 acres of wetlands before leaving. A cursory googling of the KBPI mudfest incident didn't reveal the outcome, but at most a dozen people (out of ~200 vehicles) actually saw charges filed. If I was personally facing the remediation of 7 acres of wetlands, I'd be selling out every jackass who came with me and didn't get caught. That's the power of throwing the full cost on the unlucky one who got caught.
This is a point of contention in Rhode Island where (I think) the state constitution says that coastline, defined as a place that the tide regularly covers and uncovers, is public land. I believe the original intent was to preserve access for fishing. Lots of wealthy people who own waterfront property go to great lengths to prevent access to the shoreline between their property and the sea. Even in instances where the state has declared the public can walk over a specific privately-owned seawall or down paths to access the shore, landowners hire security guards, install elaborate alarm systems, puncture tires, and generally do whatever they can to harass anyone trying to legally exercise their rights. It's pretty pathetic.
The same thing happens in California; they can block access to the beach, but they cannot block you from walking up the beach, or landing a boat. They try anyway.
Just give us the right/freedom to roam like in Scotland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, etc. The lands in question are completely uncultivated. The owner suffers no loss by letting people walk there.
With the intent to not keep the public land public forever thought, right?
By the time THAT came up, it was too hot button of a topic to sell it. For better or worse.
This would be a huge PITA. See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
And in particular checkout the section titled: Survey design and execution.
Now keep in mind errors happened a lot over large distances with difficult terrain and lines got skewed. But defining a chunk of land as the "Southwest quarter of the Northeast quarter", and then breaking it down from there by physical corners set in the ground is pretty sensical even when things get skewed. With hexagons, you COULD do the same thing, but I don't think the errors would come out so well. You'd have to be more careful to tie to more points/lines in order to not accidentally create conflicting definitions.
It sounds like a nightmare honestly.
It's not immediately obvious to me how you colour 50% of hexagons equally dispersed on an infinite grid without cutting some areas off, can you provide a picture?
Well shoot...yes, that part fails.
Perhaps hexagons cut in half (causing 6-corner intersections) or the isosceles trapezoid pattern below would work.
https://robertlovespi.net/2020/06/03/tessellation-of-isoscel...
Partly it'd be cool to have it look like Settlers of Catan.
You could have them spiral around each other (i.e. start with two hexagons next to each other, have the left one go up/right and the right one go down/left and keep wrapping clockwise).
I think this is only having the areas not be "cut off" in the mathematical sense, though.
Hexagons do not perfectly tesselate a sphere. That's why soccer balls have pentagons.
Allowing people to walk fence lines to get to public land, corner or completely locked by private land, seems like a nicer, comprehensive solution, if we can be okay with the implicit taking.
Not if you own eight blocks around one public one.
How could you if it's a checkerboard pattern?
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “the act of owning a big private ranch and trying to claim public land that it surrounds as inaccessible is effectively illegal?” The fact that the end result is that “big private ranches are illegal” doesn’t strike me as irrational. These people are well aware that the large swathes of land around them are public land. The fact that they may have purchased them under the assumption that no one would be able to access that land isn’t really an idea that garners a whole lot of sympathy.
It has been illegal since 1885, but apparently the state doesn’t want the feds involved (it’s a fed law), and the fed is trying to look the other way - most likely because of very rich donors.
> But the net effect of this setup is that "big private ranches" are effectively illegal in Wyoming
No they aren't. All the private ranch owner has to do is purchase the land from its current owner. IE the government.
A private ranch can't steal that land from the government though, through some complicate surround maneuver, like from the board game "Go", of course.
Are these tracts actually being sold by the government? My understanding from the article is that they are being managed as general DOI/forestry land, there's no one in the government to take a check for them even if you want to write one.
Keyword here is assumption. And it’s a pretty shit assumption if you ask me, that public land is somehow yours because you own the land next to it.
Fine the owner for having blocked access to the public land with chains. Uno reverse card.
And it seems like the judge agrees with you. Nonetheless adverse possession is a real legal principle that has been applied in situations like this (though maybe not against the federal government? I'm not the expert). It's not like this was a gonzo or weird argument. There really does seem to have been a standard convention in place that treats these checkerboard tracts as unitary properties.
If you have 2 row houses touching corner-to-corner and the other two corners are both public land with one side otherwise inaccessible, something is going pretty wrong.
New York has a law to cover exactly this - the landlord has to provide acess through the building. This (and other zoning shenanigans) is why so many buildings in NYC have public atriums or plazas attached. Of course many of those are also conveniently locked all the time because the landlords "forget" that they're public space.
I haven't looked at it closely this time around, but I recall from the previous time looking at it and there is already access to the public parcel from the other side, it's just wildly inconvenient if you're on this side but you, i.e. don't "need" an easement to get there. Something like that, I hope I'm remembering it right.
You could allow the fences to be in the public area and allow people to walk on either side of the fence. Assuming of course that it's fine for people to walk "inside" the fences, which might depend on whether you are keeping sheep or crocodiles.
I meant when they originally designed it, they should have designed in an easement.
It's a puff of logic in either circumstance:
If he's wrong, he never had exclusive rights to public land in the first place and it was not his to lose.
If he's right, he obviously did not suffer the loss of the value of that property.
I believe corner crossing _was_ illegal until this court case
If the fed raises the interest rates, my stocks go down in value. Do I sue the fed for my losses? Ranch owner logic.
>Maybe he can sue the judge next?
AKA an appeal
If I would see two hunters cross my property like this then I'd run after them and offer them a cup of coffee. Some people can get unbelievably petty about these sort of things; a few years ago a neighbour called the police on me after I "invaded his property" by ... knocking on his front door; couldn't even open my mouth before he started shouting about it. Ended up having the police at my house three times over it until they told him to stop being a complete spanner. Some people's brains just work so differently that sometimes I think maybe there really are different human races and that we've just been using the wrong properties to classify them.
If the only way to access that land is through the corners of that guys property, by preventing access that way he essentially gets that land for his own personal use.
I get that, but it's still pretty disgusting. As if tens of thousands of acres of land and millions of dollars in the bank isn't enough for someone. These people are a stain on humanity.
He also illegally put chains up to prevent access to the public land across the corner.
He also sent his ranch employees to harass the hunters while they were on public land. Clowns.
That's exactly why crossing private property to reach public land should be allowed. Not just corner crossing, but actually walking across his land. As long as you don't damage anything, don't enter or peek into any buildings, and that's a reasonable way to reach public land.
The whole idea that you could claim public land for private use by blocking access to it should be wildly illegal.
But it's not the only way.
You could paramotor in and out for example.
While most cases don't make international news, the sad reality is that ostensibly petty or trivial real estate arguments consume vast resources globally - this case is the figurative drop in the ocean. And really, they always have - this isn't new, any more than your quoted bickering-children example is.
The reason is the same reason that 'real estate' earned the key descriptor 'real'. People will literally go to war over two things: people, and land (*some would add religion, but I'd suggest that's generally been a convenient excuse under which lay the truly motivating people+land end goals).
Corner crossing being illegal is supreme court precedent for what it's worth. It was not at all a foregone conclusion that the hunters would win here.
I think it depends on if you step on the land or jump across only using the airspace. In the US the land laws follow many British/Roman ancient laws.
A land owner doesn’t own the airspace above or the ground below. Only what they are reasonably enjoying and using. The airspace at this corner isn’t used by the rancher.
And now this specific right is codified in caselaw. It always existed just wasn’t spelled out for this specific purpose.
Never underestimate the degree of pettiness someone will apply over something minor. Especially if they have money.
I'm pretty sure in the UK (where incidentally I can't think of any public land you could hunt on) that there is a concept of an implied easement. That is if you own a patch of land surrounded by another patch of land then you logically must have an easement, or you could never use it.
Scotland has Right to Roam legislation via its Land Reform Act that works pretty well (folks take advantage of it all the time in the highlands), that was an Act of the Scottish Parliament though and only applies to Scotland. The rules in England are not so open IIRC, property law is one of the areas that England and Scotland diverge in approach on a little, its fully devolved to Scotland. The Scottish legislation permits the general public to cross private lands such as farms so long as they respect the property, close all gates etc, don't damage crops and so on.
There have been some instances of abuse of the Scottish system, but its pretty few and far between.
Scotland and England have separate legal systems, hence the confusion - there is no UK wide standard answer on right to roam.
> https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19459239.right-roam-work...
Rule is the same in (at least some jurisdictions of) the US. Google easement by necessity if you care to know more.
Trouble in this case is the public owns the BLM land, right? So they would be the ones entitled to an easement and they have not sought one. Perhaps they should.
That was a surprising lesson for me when I was roaming California and asked a local how to reach that hill: "You can't, it's private." Hadn't encountered the idea before that one could restrict access to forest like that.
Neither had the native peoples prior to Europeans colonizing.
This was one of the things I was enamored with when I visited New Zealand. It was my first experience with that.
Unfortunately in New Zealand we have no right to roam, beyond riverbeds and beaches. Access is negotiated, often by the Department of Conservation or a regional council, sometimes in exchange for paying a share in maintenance of an access road.
This often means you might be able to walk through farmers paddocks, to access a track, but little guarantee that you could do this in the future.
The Swedish call it Allemansrätten and it's lovely.
It shouldn't even be possible to capture an area of public land for yourself by buying all the land around it, effectively land-locking it from the public. How stupid of the government to even let the scenario happen in the first place. I like the idea of another commenter: The government should just take narrow easements around the borders of all public lands, and paths through private lands for the cases where some area of public land is surrounded like this.
It isn’t legal. See the Inclosures act of 1885.
An offer of compensatory acreage adjacent to and redraw of property lines may entice support.
In California beaches are public property and the CA coastal commission (established in the 1970s) has the responsibility of protecting the beaches and guaranteeing access. https://www.coastal.ca.gov/whoweare.html
IIUC, this is enshrined in Rhode Island's constitution, as mentioned here [0].
[0] http://www.crmc.ri.gov/publicaccess/PublicAccess_Brochure.pd...
And the first step of that court process should be a judge deciding if a case has merit or not.
Aka “summary judgement”, where the judge assumes everything side A alleges is true, and evaluates if there is even a justiciable claim. If there isn’t, the judge grants summary judgement to side B.
The thing is, law is complex, overlapping, and often unintuitive. Especially property law. Although a non lawyer might think a claim is stupid or ridiculous, the law itself might not see it that way.
This is one of those times. I believe we have the right outcome here and it’s a great day, but usually when non lawyers think a case is legally obvious, they are wrong.
The case may be morally obvious—as here—but law and morality are different things. And just because the law ought to be obvious—again, as here—doesn’t mean it is obvious.
That's what happened:
> Chief U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl granted the hunters’ request to dismiss most of Eshelman’s lawsuit
Thank you very much!
Hmm, what actually happens then if you'd have a fully enclosed piece of public land without even any corners to reach it?
I own land in this general vicinity, and part of the purchase process that the title insurance company covered when I bought it was ensuring that not only was I really purchasing what I thought I was purchasing, but that access to the land was guaranteed: I and all the plots around me have easements where a quasi-government entity guarantees roads that connect my plot to county roads, then state highways, then interstate highways.
I would say that if land was purchased that completely blocked off access to public land without such easements, somebody screwed up royally with regard to such easements. Not sure if that's what actually happened with the land in question?
edit: actually reading an article linked within the one linked here: "This is a murky legal area, due in part to the failure of Congress to ensure access to landlocked federal public lands". So yeah, someone screwed up royally and it was Congress.
It becomes landlocked and only accessible by land to the landowner(s) of the surrounding parcels. It is still accessible by air, but chartering a chopper is very expensive.
I’m not sure what rules there are if there’s a navigable waterway that goes into the public land through private land, there may be issues if you have to portage around obstacles on the river onto the private land. I would assume that if you can access the navigable waterway from public land, you are allowed to use it to reach the landlocked public land by traveling along the waterway through private land, but I’m not 100% sure.
No, while the airspace and touching a pole allegations were just dismissed, there was also—and still is—a “trespassing by foot elsewhere on the property” allegation that is still live, and it is that allegation to which the comment about “nominal damages” applies. So the original $7.75 million claim wasn’t just for corner crossing.
Oh, well that makes it way more reasonable. /s :-)
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. My wife does some work on the medical side of the Personal Injury industry and there's always some comedy about PI lawyers trying to juice the moral equivalent of a stubbed toe into a 7-figure case.
But if corner crossing is legal that value was never accurate in the first place. It can't be considered 'lost'.
This is really some pretty contrived reasoning.
There's some precedent saying corner crossing is not legal. The owner almost certainly bought the property with that in mind.
Fixed now!
(Submitted title was "Udge rules Wyoming corner crossers did not trespass")
Thing is, nobody in the right mind back in 1850 or whathaveyou would have thought of "walking across private land to get somewhere" as some sort of civil or criminal trespass.
That's... how you got places.
If you actually damaged something -- broke a fence, stole a horse, dug a ditch, whatever -- then, yeah, you'd get in trouble if you got caught.
I heard from a friend that moved out to a rural area that especially the newcomers moving in from cities are super-sensitive about "their property". His neighbor -- from NYC -- threatened a lawsuit because my buddy's truck broke off some branches that extended out into the common road.
Folks that have been living out there awhile are cautious with outsiders, but overall a lot more neighborly, just because you have to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam:
“The freedom to roam, or "everyman's right", is the general public's right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the "right to roam".
[…]
The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently fundamental that it was not formalised in law until modern times.”
In Bavaria we have the problem, people like the country side, so idylic and romantic. Then they move, and all of a sudden the cows and church bells become a nuissance, not to speak of all the actual farm work going on.
To the extent it wasn't intentional to allow it, you would think it would have been easily rectified as soon as it started being exploited, if not for corruption. Imagine if you went to the gas station and said you wanted to buy specifically the second, fourth, and sixth gallons out of the pump, and the first, third, and fifth would "coincidentally" need to go into your tank too, but you shouldn't have to pay for them. They would tell you to F off out of there because that's stupid. Yet apparently the federal government was happy to sell the land in this pattern. This is a problem even Ticketmaster solved trivially simply by not allowing you to orphan one seat in the middle.
I just re-read your post after initially replying having missed the important detail that the now-private parts are the plots originally granted to the railroads. My last reply here was made without grasping that. Are these "rail line" situations the only (or at least vast majority of) places where these public/private checkerboards exist? Or did the government actually sell other land in such a pattern at the request of the buyer?
Everyone I know who has tinkered with it loves it.
I don't know how much I enjoy the language per se, but I went to a talk on Go once and ended up married to the organizer.
I dislike golang the least among languages I have to code.
I generally don't like any programming language after I have tens of thousands of lines of it written
I apologise for making such a generic joke
All good. Generics are too new in Go for it to land.
Those were the first two dots I was trying to connect as well.
Go would be a halway analogy for two parties claiming checker-board plots aiming to deny access, if corner crossing isn't allowed.
The analogy breaks down because 'being allive' would require access to the edge, rather than having two liberties. Playing with such a different definition of life and death does seem like an interesting 'variation' of go.
What? You have conflated a thick pattern, checkerboard, with a special case, liberties at the edge.
You have mashed some words together and they do not make sense if you know what you are talking about.
Go is in so far a good analogy in that two stones that are only connected diagonally, aren't really connected. You can cut through them. And you should. Just like there hunters.
Let me extend my rant, please, around bad analogies and go.
A diagonal connection is a very thick connection. The major complaint about this connection is that it is not efficient; hearing someone say that the stones are not really connected is, once again, just hearing that you are 30-20k. I am being generous about 20k.
There is a creek on one side. On the other side of the creek is more green space and another house. On either side of our house are other houses that back up to their own slices of the green space. Everyone has an agreement that we won’t go into anyone else’s part of the green space. Other people don’t have a way to access the green space without going through someone yard. Technically at either end they could get into the green space, but there is a forest without any paths and lots of blackberry plants and poison Ivy blocking the way. In all the years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen anyone attempt it.
No. This ruling doesn’t say you can walk through the backyard. If you can jump over it without touching the privately owned ground, it’s applicable.
Based on this ruling and the cited prior case law I would not want to take that to court. It's fairly clear that the govt will uphold public access to public land, with a fallback of eminent domain (seizure for fair compensation) of private land in order to facilitate public access.
A prior case has a situation where the govt seized land to build a road to allow public access. The ruling was that the govt could not do such a thing without fair compensation.
The checkerboard pattern was explicitly the form of land grants to railroad companies to compensate them for laying track across the country. Early national equity compensation :)
Sure .. after the land parcels and ennumeration scheme had already been laid down .. and not limited to rail grants - there was a general US pattern of checkerboarding all land grants to disperse development.
The foundational aspect to the question posed is that land was gridded in abstract from afar before any aportions were made, a secondary aspect was that in some regions large tracts of those squares were initially granted to various railroads on an "every second large chunk" basis, another aspect was that in the days of open cattle grazing early land cattle barons realised they didn't have to own land to graze on it and they could control access to unowned land by only paying for surrounding land or for "chokepoint" land in rough terrain.
A 'final' aspect to the story is the creation of the US National Parks movement which started a wave of "freezing" as yet unsold land as permanently held as not for private use.
A key point is that the Land Grant Act of 1850 granted checkerbordered land to railroad companies within at most 50 miles of planned rail routes .. however that practice wasn't limited to rail grants - Tribal lands were also checkerboarded by the Dawes Act and public land was released on a checkerboard basis.
You can see the checkerboard ownership even in early cattle country that had no history of railroad grants - the large squares were the unit of sale and typically the early sales were for homesteads in the midst of unclaimed land with the next sale not being "right next door" but for another homestead block in the midst of unclaimed land.
It's the appeal of owning your house, shed, assets, yards, etc. while not having to pay to own the land your cattle are moved through for seasonal pastures.
Eventally all land would presumably have been purchased .. but the National Parks started freeing things up.
There's more on this (but not the complete picture) in:
That explains why it was split up, but not why in a square grid. It sounds like the "corner" issue could have been avoided by using a hexagon pattern, right? That way corners are only shared by sections that also share a side. Then again, I haven't been able to convince my friends that using a hexagon grid for our tabletop RPG games is worth it despite the advantages seeming obvious to me (no need for weird rules about moving diagonally), so I suppose this would have been a hard sell to the late 19th century government as well.
In the 19th century no one would so daft as to think ownership of a random plot of land would give you the right to keep people from traversing it. Someone cutting down your trees, hunting, grazing their cattle or sheep, mining, farming it, yes. Just walking across it? They'd think you were a loon.
I think it was a sound policy. The problem is that the government never decided to sell the land. If they fold it to individuals, those people can put in easements to access their land but that never happened
But how were the railroads supposed to lay track from one of their squares to the next without this "corner crossing"?
The land on which the railroad was built was handled separately. This was land in the vicinity of the proposed railroad, which would increase significantly in value if and only if a functional railroad was completed.
But how do you build a railroad from one square to another without part of the railroad ending up on any of the squares you don't own?
Also, isn't this somewhere in the mountains where there are no railroads?
The land wasn't granted to build railroads on, it was granted in payment for the railroads. Towns would naturally spring up near the railroads, and both the government and the railroad companies could then sell the land to people who would live on it, farm it, ranch it, etc.
It's reasonable the first infringing corner reduces the value more than the last, just like the first N miles reduce car value more than the last N
Looking at the map in the article, it looks like it is pretty much a checkerboard. Ie. Half is owned, half is not. So you'd expect a 50% reduction (minus a couple of percent for edge squares which are not yet enclosed)
Which article has a map of this ranch? I've been looking but haven't found one.
EDIT: I finally found maps in the opinion:
https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
I think you may have inverted the meaning of what I was saying.
Subsequently:
> Officers said they would submit reports to the county attorney who, documents say, subsequently ordered a deputy to charge the men, which happened on Oct. 4.
Not only did they lose in court -- they further cemented this ruling as a matter of settled law.
That’s why this article about money not winning is on the front page. The cognitive dissonance to attack boogeymen is mind boggling
> That’s why this article about money not winning is on the front page.
No, its not. Its also not inconsistent with it being on the front page. Even if one assumes that the reason that it is on the front page is class sympathy with the party who prevailed on most of the issues, and not any other reason…”disproportionate” is not “exclusive”.
I’ve never accused HN of being a unitary hive mind (in fact, if you go through my posting history, you’ll see that’s an idea that I frequently mock.)
That doesn’t mean, though, that it is a representative – demographically or ideologically – slice of the population, either, and the ways it isn’t ideologically reflect, largely, the ways it isn’t demographically.
I mean, the little guy won this particular case, so I’m not sure what you’re on about …
Always remember: if it can be used against them it will be used against you!
The law, in its infinite wisdom, lets both rich men and poor men alike cut corners.
There is no winning side you have been conned.
>You know of any revolutions that solve inequality? All the ones in known history simply change who the winners and losers are and maintain inequality.
right, well obviously the revolutions solves the inequality for the previous losers.
French Revolution?
Have you been paying attention to French politics lately?
And incidentally, are you familiar with the atrocities committed during the revolution? The “vertical deportations” of the Vendée region might add some much-needed nuance to what I can only surmise to be your whitewashed, simplistic interpretation of the French Revolution.
People excitedly waiting for revolution often have no idea what a revolution actually is. If they did, they’d be aware that the most fervent revolutionaries are among the first to be executed when the establishment is overthrown. They’d also have some awareness of how the old power structures are often replaced with equivalent ones.
A revolution is a failure mode, not an end to be pursued. Read more history.
Which ended when Napoleon declared himself a hereditary monarch.
The American Revolution barely averted a military dictatorship, because Washington turned down the offer from his officers. How many times has that happened in history? Only once that I know of, which makes Washington the greatest American President.
I place Kennedy at #2, for avoiding nuclear war with the Soviets.
Ha ha, I love it. Are you going on a comedy tour soon?
What are you talking about?
I'm talking about the Gawker lawsuit bankrolled by Peter Thiel, and Thiel is on the record saying that you need a 7-figure sum to access the court system. He has to know.
a) Peter Thiel is not exactly an authority on the American justice system. He might be right that you need a 7-figure sum for the kind of hijinks he pulled with Gawker, but this isn't the same thing at all.
b) FTFA:
> Wyoming Backcountry Hunters and Anglers launched a fundraising campaign in 2021 to ensure the hunters, Smith, Bradly Cape, Phillip Yeomans and John Slowensky, could have their day in court.
You still need someone with balls to be plaintiff and someone with money to fund the suit. It reeks of a constructed case, it's not the usual case of a hunter getting run off by private security or someone given the runaround by the sheriff, who knows whose side he is supposed to be on.
Maybe because it is, I bet they more than once were miffed about the whole idea if the infinitely small point of contact between two checkerboard plots preventing them to pass from one parcel of public land to another, which is technically at zero distance from the first.
I suppose they wanted to make a case to demonstrate the dubiousness of that norm, and successfully have made one. Kudos to them.
The article says the defense was funded by local hunters, fishermen and their organizations via a fundraiser.
Looks like they raised it this session - glad to see that.
Clearly, the answer is to build a trebuchet to fling people across.
This is a brilliant "Age of Empires 2" reference.
The fence is also illegal.
I tried to Google about this, but I could not find anything. As one this page, there are no serious discussions about this matter. Can you share a reference?
According to this low level judge. The precedent is that corner crossing is illegal and fences to enforce that are ok.
Blocking access to public lands is a violation of the Inclosures Act of 1885.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title43/cha...
Not according to this ruling. But still possibly illegal in another federal circuit.
Just build a ladder high enough.
I see you, and raise you Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_est_solum,_eius_est_us...
Or parachute in. Not sure how you’d get out though.
Seems as though it is not illegal, at least according to this ruling?
It's a nice story but not great to think that we need to ask some oligarch's employee to be allowed to be escorted onto public land.
"A tech billionaire has fought for a decade to block access to a public beach. Now California is suing."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/08/califor...
> Are these tracts actually being sold by the government?
If you say "It is illegal for me, ajross, to purchase stale2002's house".
And then I respond by saying "No, it is not illegal for you to do that. All you have to do is get me to agree to sell you the house"
And then your response to this is by saying "But you aren't selling your house!"
This final response by you, does not prove the first statement you made to be true.
It continues to be legal for you to purchase my house, if I agree to it. Just like it continues to be legal for a rancher to purchase land from the government, if they agree to it.
Just because you are not very good at convincing the government/state legislator to sell you that land, does not make it illegal for you to purchase the land from them, if they choose to sell it to you.
Rather, if you, stale2002, tell me that "all" I need to do to build a large ranch is to purchase land that isn't for sale (and hasn't been for 140 years!)... your response does nothing to refute my point upthread, which is that large ranches in Wyoming are de facto illegal.
You can't have a big ranch. That's silly. You also can't use "corners" to prevent access to land you don't own, because that too would be silly. Two sillies don't make a sane, as it were. Someone should fix this, because the regulatory regime is bananas. This court case isn't doing anything to help, it's just negating the silly.
I think when you are specifically the government and will definitely refuse to sell the land, the line is a little grayer.
Still, if he had won the case, it would have stayed illegal and he would have had no financial loss.
If he had lost the case, he would have suffered a financial loss, but having lost cannot recover it from the "trespassers".
Wealthy people have no idea what "enough" means. This guy could use his time to explore a different acre of his own land every day for 50 years and still not visit his entire property. Instead he's going to court to try to block people from accessing land that isn't even his.
EDIT: Yup, I would have bet my life on it. The plaintiff is the kind of guy who donates millions to an organization to overturn the 2020 election, and then sued them for damages when they failed to overturn it [1]. And when a federal judge cast doubt on his lawsuit, he dismissed it and immediately re-sued in state court, shopping for a better judge. What a piece of work!
1: https://wyofile.com/corner-crossing-landowner-gave-millions-...
All of that seems like evidence that he fully intended to seize this public land for his private use, and I think he should be very seriously fined for that.
Even stepping on land should be legal as long as you don't cause any damage or infringe on any privacy. It's disgusting that rich landowners can effectively seize control of public land by denying access to it. That should be illegal and punished harshly.
Nordic countries have this as well. It’s colloquially translated as “every man’s land”.
https://visitsweden.com/what-to-do/nature-outdoors/nature/su...
It's actually pretty good law which makes a distinction between innmark and utmark (innmark being cultivated land, grassing fields, gardens and so on and utmark being "wilderness", or everything that is not innmark), gives the public a right to use private roads and man made paths over innmark to reach utmark, protects the "private zone" (houses, including gardens) etc. It balances the publics right to roam with the land owners legitimate interests as good as possible in my opinion.
Allemansrätten is the name IKEA gave to its sauce/gravy mix, perhaps to bring awareness?. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/allemansraetten-mix-for-cream-s...
In England, it's really a wonderful experience. Most fences have points where you can simply walk over the fence and follow a path to some green space. It's ridiculous to think we can create islands of public property only accessible by paying a private land owner (or risking trespass).
I wonder if that might be why the US has stricter property laws on this and no universal right to roam: to restrict the native people.
This wasn’t about the few square feet needed to open up a corner or an easement on those few square feet. It was about this asshole millionaire rancher who thought of the public land (thousands of acres) as his and harassed these hunters.
Brought this up as a sibling comment in this thread, but “The Narrows” in Texas is almost precisely what you describe: https://texasriverbum.com/index.php/2014/09/17/hike-and-hass...
Thanks for sharing this, it was an interesting read!
To be less charitable, the owner almost certainly bought the property thinking he could use his billions to bully people into not crossing the corner, allowing him to use not only the property he bought, but also the property that belongs to the people as his personal back yard.
Very pleasingly, the "Land Reform Act 2003" in Scotland formalised this fundamental right: https://www.apidura.com/journal/freedom-to-roam-in-scotland-...
To be fair, attaching a bell to a cow is animal cruelty and quite unnecessary nowadays. For the outrageous price of one cow bell you can also get RFID trackers for the whole herd. Or at least a handful of GPS trackers. And that also easily fixes the annoyance of cow bells.
Also, cows themselves are not annoying. What is annoying is their owners herding them over public roads and lands, having them shit everywhere without cleaning up. And that is pervasive in rural Bavaria, far more than in the reset of Germany.
You are not from Munich by any chance?
That's also a problem in cities: people love the idea of living downtown in the old city center, close to cafes and stuff, and once they live there, they complain about the noise from those cafes.
Just think a minute about where you're moving to.
It's possible to install very-thick sound dampening curtains and various other sound proofing measures.
> You can see the checkerboard ownership even in early cattle country that had no history of railroad grants
That’s interesting, there are places where public/private checkerboards emerged naturally? The wiki link only tells the land-grant and reservation part of the story.
There were also "released for public sale" checkerboards practices and tribal reservations that were checkerboarded.
I had a better grasp and notes on this in the late 1990s, if you read the wikipedia page closely I seem to recall they make brief passing reference to both Homestead and Dawes Acts (~ 31st congress (?) era IIRC).
The railroad grants were the largest best known example by a long shot I believe, however not the first or only example and all based on an ealier gridding abstraction and a practice of encouraging development to spread out.
There's an intertwining of rich private interests and public policy .. people with entire full PLSS squares were able to influence land release patterns and the idea of vast endless "untouched" lands where you weren't forced to have neighbours had appeal.
Many European countries still have freedom to roam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam
And having grown up in Norway, I feel Americans talking of "land of the free" while allowing landowners to block off even their own land is offensive on the face of it.
The ridiculous lengths these hunters had to go to in order to avoid straying onto private land is antithetical to freedom (you still need hunting licenses in Norway; and permission to hunt on private land so there are still potential issues, but worrying about a few meters and the accuracy of GPS to avoid even crossing a tiny little portion of private land is not one of them).
I don’t know, blocking people off “your land” goes back centuries. Probably millennia.
Yep, this law was mentioned in the article as something the defendants cited
Wow, that’s wild! When I heard about this case, I assumed the rancher owning diagonally-adjacent lots was a rare edge case. From the map, it looks like this strange situation was intentionally created at large scale. Anyone know why?
So if each private section erects a square-shaped pillar which has a side of ~3 feet at each corner, would that be both legal, and sufficient to prevent people from crossing?
Alternately, a tall fence?
No. As the article explains, it's illegal to physically block access to the land, and it's legal to climb over man-made obstacles like fences.
No, the judge said, you can cross the corner as long as you don’t step on the private land. The land owner may not create a physical obstacle at that corner. And if there is one, you are allowed to scale it to get to the other side of the corner.
It would be pretty hilarious if the land owner here gets charged in connection with blocking access to public land with the chains.
Inset on the left, about a third of the way down
It's a blurry map, but seems to show this ranch (in yellow)
Oh, yeah, I saw that one, but I wouldn't try to draw any conclusions from it. It's a link to another article[0] that provides the map with a proper caption:
> The area around Elk Mountain is surrounded by a checkerboard pattern of public (yellow) and private (white), as well as state (blue) lands.
So the yellow is actually the public land, and it's unclear how much of the white is actually the ranch in question and how much is just other private land.
[0] https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.3/north-public-lands-why-four-...
That’s a lot of word diarrhea to say that it being on the front page is not representative of anything and that you have the secret actual guide to HN ideologies.
Pray tell, what is your source for the boogeyman you are attacking since it’s not what is popular?
I thought it was on the front page to show how brilliant land management plan is ridiculous in implementation.
> Have you been paying attention to French politics lately?
To be fair, the last revolution in France was 150 years ago, things change quite a bit in 150 years.
> your whitewashed, simplistic interpretation of the French Revolution
You seem to be equally biased, if on the other side. Events as large as a revolution are complex enough that it is hard to fit them into a manichean assessment.
It’s hardly “biased to the other side” to point out the missing half in someone’s reasoning.
The actual court ruling is here: https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
(kudos to whoever linked it up thread - couldn't find that comment again, but had it open in a tab).
I should have been more clear in my original post:
The precedent is that corner crossing is illegal and fences to enforce that are ok.
I meant to ask: Are fences around your lot of land legal? I would think, yes, to protected livestock against predators. However, it would be trivial to add a small space at the corner for people to do "corner crossing" between checkerboard public lands.Next, the PDF is a great share. I am feasting on it now! Page 7 reads:
Other than these chained-together signs, there were no posts, fending, or building within one-quarter of a more of the corner.
What a laugh! Thank goodness this kind of behaviour is being overruled!Another good part (pg7 again):
[T]here is no evidence the Defendants caused any damage to the Plaintiff's property.
On page 9, the photo of A-frame ladder in action is brilliant! The guy looks so hardcore in 100% camo. This is the like the ultimate HN "legal hack". If you position the ladder just right, all four legs will be in public lands.No, according to the Inclosures act of 1885.
Judges make the law in this country due to our common law system. The law from 1885 may say that fencing off legally accessible land is illegal, but according to the land owner the supreme court said corner crossing is illegal so the fence in this situation would not count, because it wasn't blocking legal access. The question that matters here is whether corner crossing is allowed, the fence question follows.
> Not sure how you’d get out though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery... , also known as "Skyhook" and pretty well demonstrated in "The Dark Knight".
Simple, you could use a Paramotor.
> You can't have a big ranch. That's silly.
You absolutely are allowed to do this! All you have to do is purchase the land from the people who own it.
> which is that large ranches in Wyoming are de facto illegal.
They aren't! Someone refusing to sell you something, is not the same as it being illegal.
Just like it isn't "defacto illegal" for you to purchase my house.
> your response does nothing to refute my point
it absolutely does, because it is not defacto illegal for you to buy my house, even if I refuse to sell it to you.
It is disingenuous to say that it is defacto illegal for you to buy my house, because I refuse to sell it to you.
> Two sillies don't make a sane, as it were
It is not silly for someone to refuse to sell you something.
The analogy would be like if you said "its silly for me to steal your home". And "it is also silly that it is defacto illegal for me to purchase your home".
It is not silly that you cannot buy my home, if I refuse to sell it to you. It is not defacto illegal for you to buy my home, because I refuse to sell it to you.
You're just... repeating the same argument. Maybe you're not understanding the use of the terminology?
Your point is a "de jure" argument, you're telling me what the law says (and for the record: I don't disagree). I'm making a "de facto" point: regardless of what the law says, owning large unbroken tracts of land in this area is a practical impossibility. And since the entity refusing to sell the land is the government itself (the body that makes and enforces those laws), I don't think it's at all a stretch to categorize this as de facto illegal: any action that resulted in big ranches not being impossible as a matter of practice would be by definition an act of lawmaking.
Stated slightly differently: if the government needs to change a law in order to make something possible, then that thing was "illegal" previously.
Perhaps! But my Swedish friends tell me the nomenclature that IKEA uses for their products makes absolutely no sense whatsoever
I found it quite interesting as well, especially the legality aspects because at least in Texas, the law that the article cites that enshrines people’s right to do this isn’t even 100% clear on whether it’s ok. There’s some more interesting discussion about the place on this Reddit thread that I found when I was re-researching it after reading through this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/pekej7/i_finally_ma...
No? What would that have to do with anything?
I just wanted to check whether or not a beaten to death cliche was true or not.
Mostly from railroad land grants in the late 1800’s. Land along routes was checkerboard divided, odd lots stayed feds, even went to railroad companies.
I was originally remembering a time period when the railroad virtually had public domain authority to seize private lands, but the history of the land grants in Nebraska is actually much worse: https://nebraskastudies.org/en/1850-1874/railroads-settlemen...
Canada did the same.
The company building the railroad was paid not only in cash, but also land (which was suddenly very valuable next to a transcontinental railway).
But to avoid giving them all the prime spots, the checkerboard system was put in and they were given 50%, so the other 50% could be purchased by anyone.
It’s a known way of gaming the system (mostly), and seems like the state and county is generally a fan too, since the owners are pretty rich (and likely curry favors locally), and the public land is federal, so not ‘theirs’.
Trying to interpret your words here - is this a situation where the landowner has to pay the government for the part they own, or pay taxes on it or something, and the checkerboard pattern reduces the payment while giving them effective ownership over the whole area? Maybe the locals are sort of scamming the feds?
Similarly, I wonder if there is any room for suits over valuation of land predicated on the exclusive use of inaccessible public land. Someone at some point has definitely advertised this as a plus of owning the adjacent land.
wow I didn't think they meant checkerboard pattern literally. I'd be interested to know why the land was partitioned that way across such a wide area
I remember looking at old Metsker maps of Washington counties when I was a kid and wondering about all those checkerboards of green and white land. My dad told me the green was public land, and couldn't really explain why it was divided that way. So it is, literally, divided up like a checkerboard. Wikipedia has an enlightening article on it [1].
You can see this pattern all across the west, a result of land grants meant to subsidize railroad development. The federal government platted all the land into sections, then gave every other section along each new rail corridor to the developer. The idea was to encourage the creation of higher-quality infrastructure, by motivating the railroad to increase the value of their land holdings, instead of simply laying track as cheaply as possible like they might do if they were paid by the mile.
There is no missing half in pointing out that the French revolution solved some inequalities. For all the blood and failure it had, some changes it introduced proved to be irreversible, such as the introduction of a constitution, and the people becoming a significant political player that has to be acknowledged when ruling.
And I would say that reading someone talk about some positive outcomes of an event and immediately feel compelled to call their views simplistic and whitewashed shows some bias.
Regarding you first point - fences around your land are perfectly fine (barring some other law, like an environmental protection law, zoning, whatever).
But it is illegal to block access to federal public lands. So you’d need to have some way through. Doesn’t have to be on the corner, it could be an easement or whatever somewhere else, but access can’t be blocked.
They intentionally did it to block people though, and try to defacto claim the public land as theirs - which is illegal.
This is well settled federal law. The landowner was attempting to make up an alternative story while ignoring the settled law. He failed.
It absolutely is not. Corner crossing was literally illegal right up until this decision came out. Using fences to enforce that was absolutely allowed since the public land was technically not accessible. This is far from the first case about corner crossing, hopefully it will be the last.
Which one?
That it is usually people from Munich that complain about smells and noises in the, their words, pitoresque countryside.
It’s a bit indirect. The private land is worth a lot more if they can connect contiguous lots, expressly or implicitly.
It would cause a huge uproar if the fed sold the land, but this allows them to defacto ‘capture’ it as long as no one asserts the right laws.
By stopped the public from accessing the intervening public land, it defacto gives them ‘ownership’ (as in they can do what they want with it) on the federal public land, but without having to pay for it, pay taxes on it, etc.
These rural areas are typically pretty poor, and the private land owners usually have no issues influencing county and state level politics. The county this is happening in (Carbon County) has a hair under 15k people in it, and a median income of $62k. Wyoming overall has a population of $ 570k and most of them live in 1-2 cities.
Dropping $1m in Washington DC will barely make a dent lobbying wise. Spreading the same over the Wyoming and Carbon County gov’t would be… quite powerful.
Cite? Because that seems like complete BS. The judge even dismissed it in the summary judgement, it wasn’t even a close thing.
And they aren’t allowed to put up fences to deny access to public land, that’s the entire point of the Inclosures act.
https://wyofile.com/corner-crossing-video-do-they-realize-ho... goes over some of the case law. The local DA cites a few of the cases. Obviously it's a bit up in the air which is why the judge didn't toss this case before it went to trial.
Yeah no, this is what I called out in another thread. Corner crossing is legal, because making it so they can’t corner cross (or otherwise access the land) is illegal - The Inclosures Act of 1885. But the locals want to pretend the federal law doesn’t exist, because it lets them defacto capture this public federal land.
Still doesn’t make what the hunters did illegal, or what the rancher did legal. But it’s why it got to this point.
The Inclosures act had never been taken to court in relation to corner crossing before this case. Wyoming had a long history of corner crossing being illegal. That may have been contrary to the inclosures act, but as I said, we have a common law system. Until a judge says the current interpretation is wrong that's the law. So sure, corner crossing may have been "legal" since 1885, but only if you had the resources and knowledge to bring a case to federal court so you can get the wyoming corner crossing law overturned. Until that happened it was not legal.
I mean this is the same as countless supreme court decisions. Was gay marriage legal prior to Obergefell? No, obviously not. The ruling was based on a law that has been in existence since the civil war, but until the judges interpreted that law it did not matter.
More BS.
Federal law overrides state law. It’s Article VI, Paragraph 2 of the constitution, if you want to double check.
Where federal law says it is illegal to block access to public lands, it is illegal to block access to public lands. Even more so when we’re talking federally owned public land.
There is no law (or judicial interpretation) that Wyoming can pass that is constitutional to change that.
Here is a cite, which you haven’t provided any supporting you case, clearly stating as such, regarding the Inclosures act and someone playing similar games - around 1893. That instance was in Colorado, but was sustained by the Supreme Court and applied nationally.
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/167/518]
If you have an actual cite to an actual applicable case, please do post it. The earlier link literally agrees with me, as the judge cited the Inclosures Act when dismissing the claims that corner crossing was illegal.
Otherwise, stop spamming this propaganda.
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