Even the fact that the ranch manager got worked up about their having passed over what must have been two feet of private property at the very edge of the ranch leads me to believe that the ranch owner was effectively treating the public square as an extension of his land and recruiting the local authorities to act as his enforcers. All very Yellowstone-y.
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[1] From TFA: "This checkerboard pattern allowed the government to keep all the undeveloped sections in between and wait for them to go up in value before turning around and selling them to developers".
The obvious solution is, of course, to just allow people to pass on other's land. Maybe with some provisionings so ensure it isn't abused. You can already beathe the air legally, why not walk the ground legally?
Land "ownership" isn't really ownership in the physical sense anyway. You are allowed a certain set of rights, but you can't even mine your ground without permission, or dump toxic waste, or forbid planes to pass over. You could easily just decide to let people over on foot, too. It wouldn't take anything away from land rights.
I think a good recent starting episode may be "Towers of Silence." https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/
Checkerboard grants were sold as a compromise: give half to the railroad so they'll build, keep half so the public can "share in the upside" later. In practice, the private squares became de facto gatekeepers to the public ones, and once land got valuable enough (ranching, minerals, hunting rights, viewsheds), the optimal move for the private owner was to weaponize ambiguity in trespass law to extend control across the whole block.
Corner crossing is interesting because it attacks that hack at the most abstract layer: not fences, not roads, but the geometry of how you move through 3D space above a property line. If the court says "yes, you can legally teleport diagonally from public to public," a ton of latent "shadow enclosure" disappears overnight. If it says "no," it quietly ratifies a business model where you buy 50% of a checkerboard and effectively own 100%.
This is why the case drew such disproportionate firepower: it's not about four hunters and one elk mountain, it's about whether "public land" means you can actually go there, or just that it exists on a map while access gets gradually paywalled by whoever can afford the surrounding squares.
No easements or anything.
That land has near zero public use, but you also didn’t get revenues from it. Worst of both worlds.
All for millions of public and private money to be spent trying to figure out your back asswards land ownership scheme.
In compensation, ranchers could be given the right to create structures or rights-of-way on those same easements to connect their diagonal pieces so as to make them more useable, as long as the public has a reasonable right to access their areas.
This situation honestly makes me wonder how the ranchers even use these squares, since they face the exact same access problem, just with the opposite corners.
They don’t face the same access problems.
They can cross public land.
The Goban: Taking Liberties
https://www.irish-go.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ko-full-...
https://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/sites/ca10/files/opinions/0101...
He has an estimated net worth of $300M and fell for Donald Trump’s stolen election grift.
https://wbt.com/576/nc-man-sues-pro-trump-group-for-return-2...
