Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 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

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".

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

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?

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never underestimate the degree of pettiness someone will apply over something minor. Especially if they have money.

Outside the US, there are even many jurisdictions which make this question of easements moot, by having general rights to roam.

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...

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...

Perhaps! But my Swedish friends tell me the nomenclature that IKEA uses for their products makes absolutely no sense whatsoever

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).

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.

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 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'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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com