Wisconsin Supreme Court settles long-standing boundary ....

This seems familiar.

They affirmed so I think that means it is over.

Watch out when an Appellate Court reverses because the final result can be the opposite (that sounds crazy but happens).

Feb. 4, 2010 – Where a boundary line cannot be determined from deed descriptions, and original survey monuments have been lost or destroyed, the court must use the best evidence available to determine the legal boundary line, the Wisconsin Supreme Court recently held.

What a bunch of deed-staking piles of garbage those Supreme Court Justices are.

I wonder if the Justices, Judges and Attorneys have a "wrap" party after the final decision comes down. They can all compare notes over cocktails on how much they soaked the clients for on this case or tell war stories about cases from years gone by where they made lots of money and all the clients got was a baby splitting decision out of it or how they milked the case by sending it up and down the line two or three times by doing partial decisions and remanding it, etc.

I don't doubt it.

I haven't seen a case in State service yet, that hasn't taken multiple years to resolve. Even a seeming slam dunk but the State and the Defendant both have lots of Attorneys and resources. Months go by when the DAG (Deputy AG) calls with some question so I have to dig out the answer. The few private cases I worked on went fairly quickly but that Attorney seems to know how to get resolution fast. I think a lot depends on the Attorneys and how motivated they are to get the thing pushed through. If the client doesn't have much money then they go faster in my experience. As soon as you have well-funded clients then they seem to take forever in discovery and this hearing and that hearing and so on.

kay where have you been

The OJ trial showed conclusively that one gets the justice they can afford.

kay where have you been

What part of common useage and acquiesence don't you guys understand?

Pablo

Pablo

Are you talkin to me?;-)

The Supreme Court of Wisconsin seems to have issued a ruling that if the property as described can be located on the ground, that's the boundary. That is consistent with California case law wherein the courts have stated that the written documents have meaning and occupation is best used to determine the intent of the documents. Otherwise, why have written descriptions or original monuments at all? At least in this case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, if original monuments had been found to dispute the road as the boundary, the road wouldn't be the boundary. Am I reading that wrong?

Steve

A surveyor found a monument he considered original and filed a corner record. This would have moved the property line 600 feet from the road that had been accepted for many years. The court didn't move the line back to the purported original but held the accepted road was the best available evidence of the boundary line. Just plain common sense.

Steve

Yeah, I know. Nobody can find the original so they go with what they can assume was based on the original. I'm not saying it's right or wrong but the Wisconsin Supreme Court seems to be saying that if the written descriptions could be placed on the ground unambiguously they wouldn't have had to resort to acquiescence.

Steve

The doctrine of acquiescence is applicable even when a deed unambiguously declares the boundary line of adjacent parcels, the court of appeals held.

Buza does not hold, the court wrote, “that an unambiguous deed trumps mistaken boundary lines after the statutory period.” The road is the property line since the relevant parties acquiesced beyond the statutory period, the appeals court affirmed.

Pablo

Yes, you're reading it correctly in my view. The circuit court stated it, appellate court upheld it, and Supreme court upheld it. All without changing the reasoning. The road was held as the original line per the deeds, based on the best evidence being the improvement (road) built at or nearer the time of the original survey.

I think we know a wisconsin surveyor who would be happy to rewrite the deeds to better identify the location of this line:)

> Wisconsin Supreme Court settles long-standing boundary dispute along Henn Road
>
>> http://www.wisbar.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=News&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=100194
>
> DGG

I made a presentation in Wisconsin last October. We had a great discussion on this case based upon the Appellate decision. We're not talking about just "any" boundary line being acquiesced to here. This is a "section line" with adjoining deeds described by aliquot portion.

The sketches in the article don't do the case any justice. There is much more to be seen:

What are the chances that the 1912 section corner monument was placed 400 feet west of the Henn Road intersection based upon the "technical" double proportionate measurement?

In order to get the whole picture, you'll want to read the Appellate Court decision which was upheld in the Supreme Court decision.

JBS

Pablo

> I think we know a wisconsin surveyor who would be happy to rewrite the deeds to better identify the location of this line:)

That was the biggest part of the discussion we had about this case during my Wisconsin presentation. The room full of surveyors had a real struggle over (1) how can the court just rule that the section line is the road, when they've got evidence of the monument that surveyors have set/used? And (2), why didn't the court rewrite everybody's deeds to call for the road (the property line) and change the descriptions from aliquot to metes and bounds descriptions? And (3), if the 1915 court case would have rewritten the deeds, then the 2005 surveyor wouldn't have made the mistake of holding the found 1912 monument (which was in the county records still). And (4), how can we (should we) now change all the deeds fronting on the Section 8/9 boundary to call to the different line? And (5) How will the assessor/GIS people ever get their maps right if we don't tell them they're wrong and give them the "new" dimensions?

It was a great discussion.

JBS

LRD

Hmm...I see what you're saying now that I've read the appeals court article linked to the supreme court article. Joe Forward, Legal Writer for the State Bar seems to express the exact opposite interpretation in the two articles. In the Supreme Court article he says the acquiesced line is the line if the descriptions are ambiguous and in the Appellate Court article he says acquiscence beyond the AP statutory period trumps the description. Am I reading that wrong?

Pablo

I think I have an answer to all of those questions.

How much will that cost and who will pay for it?

I know, I answered with a question. But the answer to my question will make all of your questions go away, if the number is big enough.

😀

Radar

LRD

Now that I've read the actual decisions that JB posted, I think Mr. Forward explained them correctly but the decisions themselves arrive at the same conclusion for different reasons. The Supreme Court decision said the road is the boundary because the deeds can't be accurately surveyed and the road is the best available evidence of the "true" line, while the Appellate decision said the road is the line no matter what an accurate survey would reveal. Am I wrong?

The whole case is like a Rorschach test where the same set of facts can be seen in many different ways. The Supremes acknowledged that by saying that the courts have not been consistent in such cases. I don't see anywhere in the cases where the amount of chaos that would result from moving the line 600 feet from the road was important. If the property owners had hundreds of acres of open field, maybe shifting the line wouldn't cause as much disruption.

Maybe if I studied the case record thoroughly it would be clear to me, but I'll be lazy and ask.

Is the section corner (for purposes of subdividing aliquot parts) where the corner record said, or on the adjudicated ownership boundary?

Pablo

> I think I have an answer to all of those questions.
>
> How much will that cost and who will pay for it?
>

How much do you think that it cost those landowners to fight about this line all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court? That's two years of trial prep, a full trial, and two appeals... Just think how much money the surveyor could have saved the clients by doing a bit of research to find that the boundary had been settled by court judgment 90 years prior.

The client's pay for it, that's for certain. One way or another.

JBS