If you want the full take by the Utah Supreme court about objective versus subjective uncertainty with regards to acquiescence use the link in Bahr v. Imus to Staker v. Ainsworth. Utah tried objective uncertainty for a time in 1980's but in 1990 they decided it just screwed up the purpose for the acquiescence law and took it out. They explain it very well and there is a dissenting opinion.
This is Utah and many other states laws may be different. I really like the Utah law and what I see as a very common sense approach to our boundary issues. It took me a long time and a lot of study to sort this all out. What you'd learn from everybody on the street including many surveyors is something very different from the actual law. Mentoring under this scenario doesn't help. When you need to crush the colored glasses before you can see clearly the journey takes a lot longer and is much harder. The ease at which you can research and read the actual law at this time compared to twenty years ago is amazing. There is really no excuse at this time for not learning the law. Land surveyors need to step up to their obligations to society if they want to remain relevant.
Wouldn't this be a considered a boundary line adjustment? Do most states have a procedure for these?
A boundary line adjustment is a conveyance. A boundary line agreement is merely the landowners solving the "where is our boundary" question and is not a conveyance.
The requirements for agreement and acquiescence in the location of the boundary line(s) vary from state to state, therefore we must be intimately familiar with the requirements in the states in which we practice.
In the survey I am working on, both landowners and the title company have agreed to use a quit claim deed to clear up the mess, partly because they want to close on the sale of the south lot early next week. Interestingly, I was hired by the Real Estate agent to find the corners in this fairly recent subd. (I platted this in 2000), and after discovering the problem, both landowners have agreed to split my fee.
In this county, as long as both lots still meet the minimum requirements for size, access, etc., there is no administrative web to navigate - record the deed, record the survey, and collect my fee. Everyone was happy when I showed up on the site, and everyone will remain happy after I finish the project - yee haw!
What?! No attorneys involved?
The Attorney's article displays the naive belief the legal profession and many Judges have that the Land Surveyor has the ability to precisely plot the so-called Deed line to the nearest hundredth of a foot despite controlling monuments changing over time, past inaccurate surveys, and old deed descriptions with poorly written descriptions. They seem to think 100 Surveyors would follow a technical process which puts the line in the exact same place. You can see this in Appellate Opinions where they skim over the survey with no discussion of how the surveyor did it, survey puts it here, fence over there. It's that simple to them.
Yup, some how the earth is going to reform into the shape of all the paper boundaries recorded in records. You don't even need a surveyor to show you where the paper boundary is, technology can do that, heck most landowners can download such a map, official I've been told by some with the implication that I was so dumb I couldn't even see about where the line was on the "Official" GIS picture he got from the county. He really got upset when I showed him where the 1/16 line plotted from the math and then told him the more than 50 year old fence that had been treated as the boundary all these years was the boundary in my opinion. The fence was a couple feet on his side of the math 1/16 and 10 to 15 feet on his side of the GIS, go figure! Yup, in his mind the GIS map was "official."