Posted on 11/22/2007 12:09:13 PM PST by Sue Bob
I saw that happen in a rural Iowa community a few years ago. A well known and liked doctor bought an old farm. He spent a lot of his off time there fixing and repairing and planned to build a house on it someday.
He had a neighbor that had an old trailer and some junk on a tiny piece of ground next to him and one day the neighbor fenced off a small plot of the doctors land and put a couple of goats on it.
The good doctor took pity on the family and let is slide and a few years later the neighbor claimed the land in court and got it. The doctor told me that if he had charged a dollar a year rent he would have legally retained ownership.
This stone fence grab however looks to me like it was bogus. Both neighbors should have had pretty much equal use of a rock fence.
I saw the issue decided the other way once, when a wire line fence was known to be only approximately on the property line. The neighbor claimed the fence and a hundred or so feet beyond. They surveyed and went to court and the survey ruled. The fence was as much as 50 feet off the surveyed property line in places.
In that case the neighbor land grabber lost and they built the new fence as much as 50 feet back into his corn field.
Taking a one foot wide land grab to court is pathetic.
“Taking a one foot wide land grab to court is pathetic.”
Yeah, but I guess that if you are a District Judge and you know that a fellow judge is going to be deciding your case, you may think it’s just a piece of cake!
I'm sure he can. He should also be disbarred.
The problem with the other case, from what I can tell, is that adverse possession should never have been found in the first place.
I found an article earlier today about the stone fence. According to the property owner, the judge had erected a steel fence between her property and the wall prior to bringing the action, so I don’t think that it was a good application of the law, assuming that happened. That would be an admission that the judge knew that the stone wall was not hers.
http://www.denverpost.com/keefe/ci_7557747
The problem here isn't the law, but the judges applying it.
Well, he will die someday, and then he'll face a real judge who by the looks of things, won't go so easy on him.
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