🙂 Duane Frymire
we are making some great examples here. "What we've got here is failure to communicate" (one of my favorites)
I am sure if we sat down together over a meal we would discover we are in complete agreement before the check arrived.
Happy Holidays
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Compared to what? With what unit do you measure competency?
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Ok, Dave, I sort of overstated the idea. We don't want surveyors influenced by the lawyers' mission to do anything they can get away with to win for a client.
Leon's post outlines a better approach. More important than any degree requirement is having some number of hours of land and boundary law courses.
In Florida the law states plainly: the surveyor shall determine the boundary.
Why else would the client have hired us?
teach boundary surveying in law school? why? not necessary... and surveying is not a subject that any atty. needs to know.
not even Surveyors gain much in schools, it is learned thru mentoring and experience.
My comment is overly pessimistic.
Education is necessary. There should be some minimum necessary, even an AS program would be better than what we have now which is no requirement in California.
From what I read here it seems California is better than most States. We've had stupid cases but I don't think they are the norm, maybe because of the filing requirement we've had since the 1890s.
I tried to chase down the law in California and the conclusion I have come to is boundary is more than 90% question of fact. The cases that go well seem to treat boundary as a fact question and avoid the law question as much as possible. Also there is the law and there is legal procedure which is at least as important as the law. Legal principles are taught but there is very little discussion of procedure which can turn a case more so than the law sometimes.
For the vast majority of fact sets, boundary law is quite settled, so for most cases, the courts don't need to go beyond treating the survey as a question of pure fact. They only need to ascertain that the surveyor did not apply the principles developed through settled case law incorrectly and then basically restate the appropriate legal principles when stating why the facts support one location over others.
I don't think that they so much avoid the law as that they have no need to compare potentially competing doctrines in most cases. The exception in CA seems to be Agreed Boundaries and Practical Location. A good portion of the judiciary here seems to be confused about it and so typically won't go there unless one of the parties brought a good argument with good cites to back it up, even if the facts otherwise scream for it.
Going to law school to learn about boundary surveying would be overkill, plus boundary conflicts constitute such a small percentage of law practice that it would be difficult for any law school to justify adding additional boundary law classes other than possibly a customized independent studies elective here and there.
I disagree that education offers little or nothing and that most surveyors can get all the training they need through experience and mentoring. With the trend of crew sizes having decreased from 3 to 5 people when I began surveying to 1 or 2 today, coupled with the trend of many companies sending a glorified I-man and a chainman out as a crew rather than having an experienced and licensed surveyor as the chief, mentoring is darn near dead. There have always been those who get a year or two of experience and then repeat it over and over and over... but the trend toward les mentoring opportunities and sending crews out with info and technology that takes most of the opportunity for troubleshooting in the field away, and with instructions to just bring it all back to the office for someone with brains to sort out if a situation arises that requires judgment, makes the prevalence of people who have been surveying for 6 or 8 years but with only 1 year of effective experience even greater.
CA has responded by making the PLS exam easier in format if not also in content and appears to have a target pass rate range used to determine the cut score.
I do like the idea of offering an additional year of boundary studies to other survey degrees. And I do believe that a degree offers valuable training that more often than not is not available through experience and mentoring alone. A 1-year education based boundary certification that can be added to either an Associates or a Bachelor Degree would be helpful to most surveyors and protective of the public. The biggest problem would likely be finding appropriate faculty to teach these programs as ABET requirements value advanced technical degrees over practical experience and probably give little or no consideration to legal training in faculty qualifications for what they view as an engineering-related curriculum.
Some things are correctly described only by specific and proper terms. Other, less technical or not in reference to certain legal principles need not be as precise to be properly descriptive, yet may cause some confusion to a non-surveyor if different surveyors use slightly different terms.
i.e. "A scribed X" vs "A chiseled cross"; "The map filed in Book..." vs "The map recorded in Book..."
If I wanted to think about it longer, I'm sure that I could come up with a long list of examples.
eapls2708, post: 346567, member: 589 wrote: For the vast majority of fact sets, boundary law is quite settled, so for most cases, the courts don't need to go beyond treating the survey as a question of pure fact. They only need to ascertain that the surveyor did not apply the principles developed through settled case law incorrectly and then basically restate the appropriate legal principles when stating why the facts support one location over others.
I don't think that they so much avoid the law as that they have no need to compare potentially competing doctrines in most cases. The exception in CA seems to be Agreed Boundaries and Practical Location. A good portion of the judiciary here seems to be confused about it and so typically won't go there unless one of the parties brought a good argument with good cites to back it up, even if the facts otherwise scream for it.
Yes, my reading of cases from the past couple hundred years suggests that practical location is reactionary law developed because surveyors merely measure instead of investigate. When the facts are not presented by any of the surveyors, and the attorney/client investigation brings them up, then the court must reject the surveyors measurements in favor of the facts and call it something other than a surveyed line. Hence, establishment doctrines come into play when surveyors fail society due to lack of knowledge of retracement law. It's amazing really; a whole body of law created just to make up for not requiring some basic level of legal knowledge for those who would claim to determine the legal boundaries of land in the U.S..
The only cause for me being in court over a survey was because another surveyor made a report that disagreed with my survey.
In the local courts, forty years ago I saw
a judge that divided the contested land in half every time.
a judge that made his own laws when the existing ones did not seem right to him.
a judge that dismissed any land case and awarded the contested land to the other party when an objection was made.
a judge that constantly told me that I was lying about what I thought I had found.
In recent times the courts have a better understanding of the laws that concern land disputes and all these odd judges have found that the higher courts get tired of them making stupid decisions.
Every college surveying degree I've looked into in Texas has a minimum of two semesters of Boundary Law.
Even with a metes deed like we often see, retracing it isn't just about laying out the math, I see many cases where retracing a deed will lead you to resolve conflicts, not start them.
How many times have I seen a cluster of deeds describing parcels at 330x660 in a 40 many of them beginning at a point xxx' east and south from a 1/16, 1/4 or section corner. You go to the field find a couple of irons, a bunch of fence corners, and nothing "fits" the math. But in putting it together you find it makes sense, so accepting the fence corners and the few remaining pipes DOES mean surveying the DEED, then there is no reason for "adjustments" or me "fixing" anything. And this is a small example of what Surveyor in Training means ...............I think anyway.
Too often the surveyors who want to say the landowners make the decisions walk right passed the very simple solution that they not only occupy land, but they also occupy their DEED and there is no conflict.
When I survey rural subdivision done in the 70's, probably using stadia, and there are big discrepencies
between record and measured found monuments it doesn't mean I will replace a few using math that puts them feet from a boundary fence and then say there is an issue, no I will probably use the fence corners. And to me that is laying out the DEED.
Same with interior 1/16 lines, I keep hearing that good fences that are "off" the 1/16 line can be used as property lines, as if they are somehow different than the 1/16th line , it's much easier to accept them as 1/16 lines and monument them that way, thereby taking a stand and laying out the real DEED. It's somewhat amusing to see a surveyor go around a section find some evidence (no originals) prorate in some exterior corners then declare an interior corner "off" 15' and set his own 15' from an old, old fence corner. What you work for the BLM?
In California, our Supreme Court has pretty much taken the teeth out of our Agreed Boundary Doctrine except in the case where there is already an old Survey.
Don't worry, we are still ignoring it ;-).
I read about a hundred Agreed Boundary cases from 1864 to present. A lot of them operated like you said, the Surveyor said here and the Court said that is obviously wrong so it's an Agreed Boundary. A good example is Mello v. Weaver, 36 Cal.2d 456 (1950) where a boundary depended on the location of the west 1/16th corner on the south line of fractional Section 6. The surveyor set the corner per government measurements (I think I have the 1940s Record of Survey somewhere) but if you split the distance instead it fits a canal that was obviously the boundary referred to in the Deed. This is really a Deed interpretation case but our Supreme Court resolved it by calling it an agreed boundary.
LRDay, post: 345919, member: 571 wrote: If you can't determine the boundary with enough confidence that it is correct you probably shouldn't express an opinion. Take some other route to resolution or withdraw from the survey.
This is where I'm stuck. Since most surveys are never challenged, If I walk on a survey, typically the survey job goes to a deed staker, or a company trying to maintain X amount of gross sales so hopefully they have a 15% profit margin. Their survey just adds ambiguity to the situation, if it is ever challenged. Around and around we go. My 2 cents, Jp
One thing about being in a "professional" line of work, is that you often have to make decisions or answer questions where there is not absolute correct answer. There is no "by the book" answer to many of the boundary retracement decisions we make. Do you accept a monument that appears to not have been set tot he same standard of care and precision that you would have set it? Is a monument you found that is not a called-for monument to be treated with the same dignity as an original? Do you put more weight on a fence as to being evidence of the original property line than you do an uncalled for monument and/or parol testimony? etc etc.
How do you test for that if there is no absolute answer? You must have a minimum standard.
MightyMoe, post: 346647, member: 700 wrote: Even with a metes deed like we often see, retracing it isn't just about laying out the math, I see many cases where retracing a deed will lead you to resolve conflicts, not start them.
How many times have I seen a cluster of deeds describing parcels at 330x660 in a 40 many of them beginning at a point xxx' east and south from a 1/16, 1/4 or section corner. You go to the field find a couple of irons, a bunch of fence corners, and nothing "fits" the math. But in putting it together you find it makes sense, so accepting the fence corners and the few remaining pipes DOES mean surveying the DEED, then there is no reason for "adjustments" or me "fixing" anything. And this is a small example of what Surveyor in Training means ...............I think anyway.
Too often the surveyors who want to say the landowners make the decisions walk right passed the very simple solution that they not only occupy land, but they also occupy their DEED and there is no conflict.
When I survey rural subdivision done in the 70's, probably using stadia, and there are big discrepencies
between record and measured found monuments it doesn't mean I will replace a few using math that puts them feet from a boundary fence and then say there is an issue, no I will probably use the fence corners. And to me that is laying out the DEED.Same with interior 1/16 lines, I keep hearing that good fences that are "off" the 1/16 line can be used as property lines, as if they are somehow different than the 1/16th line , it's much easier to accept them as 1/16 lines and monument them that way, thereby taking a stand and laying out the real DEED. It's somewhat amusing to see a surveyor go around a section find some evidence (no originals) prorate in some exterior corners then declare an interior corner "off" 15' and set his own 15' from an old, old fence corner. What you work for the BLM?
I never once said that surveyors should simply "lay out the math".
That would be absurd
Almost all of the survey degrees I've been familiar with have only two semesters of boundary law as well. It's not enough.
First, categorizing it as "boundary law" might be misleading in many instances even though the principles found in the text books the instructors teach from are based on law. But in many cases, rather than teaching the students how to read law to learn how boundary principles have been developed, teach the subject much the way many other courses are taught.
Most use the latest version of the "Brown" books: Boundary Control and Legal Principles and Evidence and Procedures for Boundary Location. Even though the titles themselves contain the terms Legal Principles and Evidence, which should prompt those designing the degree program or course syllibi to teach the law, they instead have the students memorize the bold Principles that are conveniently stated every so often throughout the books.
While the authors meant that to be a helpful learning device (and for some it has been), a great many students only memorize the principles and gloss over, or skip over all of the discussion, case cites and case excerpts provided to show where the principle came from and give a clue as to how and why it was developed. Even worse, since many of the instructors are numbers & tech people, they don't really understand the material and often don't really care to. They merely memorize the principles as well.
The result is that these students eventually become licensed surveyors who misapply half-remembered principles that they never really understood anyway. I have seen Board staff and "experts" for the licensing board hold misapplied and misunderstood principles stated in the "Brown" books over clearly stated law. It's pathetic that so many of the licensees of our profession know so little about the subject that the public, the legal profession and the trial courts look to us for "expertise".
I agree with Duane that this portion of the degrees would be best taught by someone with legal training. Students and the general public would be better served even if ABET would allow (require is probably way too much to hope for) the degree programs to use adjunct professors who may not have a MS or PhD in geomawhatzis, but who are practicing or retired boundary surveyors who also can teach the fundamentals of legal research, and teach their students how to read statute and case law.
No, but the wording of your initial statement gave that impression. Rather than periodically posting to tell us what you did not say, think it through, type it up in word, re-read what you wrote, fine tune it and tell us what you meant by your original statement.
As I said before, most of us posting in this thread probably have 30 or more years experience but still consider ourselves to be in training. Many of us might recall back with various amounts of humility to what our understandings of various boundary principles were before we were licensed. I can just about guarantee that if you think it through and make a reasonable attempt to better articulate your thoughts on the subject of this thread, you will be ahead of where I was on the this subject 25 or so years ago.
If you make that attempt, you will also be making an opportunity for yourself to learn even faster because by articulating what you mean rather than defending against what you didn't mean, you begin to increase your understanding and use the comments of others to fine tune your knowledge rather than seeing those comments as projectiles to deflect and defend against.
eapls2708, post: 346738, member: 589 wrote: No, but the wording of your initial statement gave that impression. Rather than periodically posting to tell us what you did not say, think it through, type it up in word, re-read what you wrote, fine tune it and tell us what you meant by your original statement.
As I said before, most of us posting in this thread probably have 30 or more years experience but still consider ourselves to be in training. Many of us might recall back with various amounts of humility to what our understandings of various boundary principles were before we were licensed. I can just about guarantee that if you think it through and make a reasonable attempt to better articulate your thoughts on the subject of this thread, you will be ahead of where I was on the this subject 25 or so years ago.
If you make that attempt, you will also be making an opportunity for yourself to learn even faster because by articulating what you mean rather than defending against what you didn't mean, you begin to increase your understanding and use the comments of others to fine tune your knowledge rather than seeing those comments as projectiles to deflect and defend against.
Answer me this.
In a short sentence describe in the most simplest terms what a surveyor does. Act like its a layman who asked you what a surveyor actually does.