> I believe that the court cases that you cite are quite old. Justice Cooley certainly is. Laws can change. Have the laws changed? If not by statute, by practice?
Laws changing by "practice"? I haven't heard that one before. Do you have any examples?
Yes, laws change by statute, but most of the laws concerning boundary location are based in common law, not statutory law. In usual circumstances, the common law stands (stare decisis) until overturned by newer common law or statutory law.
The point of using old cases is to emphasize that the principles we are talking about are not new. They have been the law of the land for a very long time, yet we continue to ignore them. The more appropriate question would seem to be where are the new decisions that have overruled these old laws? Good luck finding them.
Anyway, for example, after a very quick search I found this:
Jonkers v Summit Township, 747 N.W.2d 901 (2008), 278 Mich. App. 263
In Adams, this Court relied on the law as set forth by Justice Cooley more than 100 years ago, and which is still the law today:
Nothing is better understood than that few of our early plats will stand the test of a careful and accurate survey without disclosing errors. This is as true of the government surveys as of any others, and if all the lines were now subject to correction on new surveys, the confusion of lines and titles that would follow would cause consternation in many communities. Indeed the mischiefs that must follow would be simply incalculable, and the visitation of the surveyor might well be set down as a great public calamity.
But no law can sanction this course. . . . The question is not how an entirely accurate survey would locate these lots, but how the original stakes located them. No rule in real estate law is more inflexible than that monuments control course and distance, — a rule that we have frequent occasion to apply in the case of public surveys, where its propriety, justice and necessity are never questioned. But its application in other cases is quite as proper, and quite as necessary to the protection of substantial rights. The city surveyor should, therefore, have directed his attention to the ascertainment of the actual location of the original landmarks . . . and if those were discovered they must govern. If they are no longer discoverable, the question is where they were located; and upon that question the best possible evidence is usually to be found in the practical location of the lines, made at a time when the original monuments were presumably in existence and probably well known. . . . As between old boundary fences, and any survey made after the monuments have disappeared, the fences are by far the better evidence of what the lines of a lot actually are, and it would have been surprising if the jury in this case, if left to their own judgment, had not so regarded them. [Diehl v. Zanger, 39 Mich. 601, 605-606 (1878) (Cooley, J., concurring) (internal citation omitted).]
Yep, as far I've been able to find, Cooley is still a good authoritative source, the courts apparently still listen to him, shouldn't we??
> Does society tell us how it wants us to act by how it litigates and punishes us?
I'm not sure exactly what you are asking.
Justice Sanderson says:
Walsh v. Hill, 38 Cal. 481 (1869) involves a controversy over whether the point of beginning must always be precisely held or if subsequent courses which appear to be not in error can overcome an erroneous point of beginning:
"In conclusion, upon this branch of the case we deem it proper to say, that in the construction of written instruments, we have never derived much aid from the technical rules of the books. The only rule of much value--one which is frequently shadowed forth, but seldom, if ever, expressly stated in the books--is to place ourselves as near as possible in the seats which were occupied by the parties at the time the instrument was; then, taking it by its four corners, read it."
