The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in favor of Montana property owners who claim the U.S. Forest Service cheated them by unilaterally changing the terms of a decades-old public access agreement affecting their private land.
The March 28 decision split the court’s six-member conservative wing. Three members sided with the property owners; the other three sided with the federal government.
The decision reverses a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which threw out the property owners’ claims on technical grounds without considering the merits of the case. The new ruling allows the property owners to get their day in court to attempt to prove that the Forest Service illegally encroached on their land.
Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Jeffrey McCoy, who represented the property owners in Nov. 30, 2022, oral arguments before the Supreme Court, praised the new ruling.
“Today’s decision is a major victory for property rights,” McCoy said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times.
“The decision affirms that the government cannot manipulate procedural rules to prevent property owners from defending their constitutional rights,” McCoy said.
The lower court held that the lawsuits filed by Larry Steven “Wil” Wilkins, a veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and Jane Stanton, a widow, were precluded by the federal Quiet Title Act, Section 2409a(g) of Title 28 of the U.S. Code, which comes with a 12-year statute of limitations.
In 2004, Wilkins purchased property in rural Ravalli County, Montana. Stanton and her husband purchased a nearby property in 1990. Her husband died in 2013.
Wilkins and Stanton claimed the Forest Service unilaterally changed the terms of a decades-old agreement that allowed the agency to cross their respective properties to access a nearby national forest.
Both their properties are subject to an easement from 1962 owned by the federal government. The document conveys to the United States “and its assigns” a 60-foot easement “for a road as now constructed and in place and to be re-constructed, improved, used, operated, patrolled, and maintained.”
The original easement provided that the use of the road was to be limited to Forest Service employees and approved permit holders, such as loggers and ranchers, providing access for necessary maintenance of the surrounding forest lands. Access to the road was never intended to extend to the general public, the property owners say.
The situation changed in 2006 when the Forest Service installed a new sign on the road that read “public access thru private lands.” Since the sign arrived, traffic along the easement has surged, strangers have hunted and fired guns at their houses, and the road has suffered erosion while the properties have been damaged. At the same time, the Forest Service’s maintenance of the right-of-way has allegedly become increasingly sporadic in recent years.
The Supreme Court considered whether jurisdictional rules that lay out strict deadlines on bringing certain claims applied here, as opposed to “claims processing rules,” which afford greater flexibility for taking fairness-related considerations into account.
Wilkins and Stanton both live alongside Robbins Gulch Road in rural Montana. The U.S. government has permission for use of the mile-long road, which the government interprets to mean making the road available for public use. The two property owners complained that opening the road to the public “has intruded upon their private lives, with strangers trespassing, stealing, and even shooting Wilkins’ cat,” the opinion states.
The property owners went to court over the scope of the easement under the Quiet Title Act, which allows challenges to the federal government’s rights in real property. The government claimed the 12-year time limit specified in the act applied, so the courts did not have jurisdiction to hear the case, but the owners countered that the law is actually a claims-processing rule.
Sotomayor wrote that all three cases cited during oral arguments “point in one direction: This Court has never definitively interpreted §2409a(g) as jurisdictional.”
“All told, neither this Court’s precedents nor Congress’ actions established that §2409a(g) is jurisdictional,” she added.
“While the Government warns that revisiting precedent results in uncertainty, no revisiting is necessary here,” the opinion states. “Far more uncertainty would follow from the Government’s method of divining definitive interpretations from stray remarks,” she wrote after saying the government speculated about what the court “might have thought” in a previous ruling.
Sotomayor’s opinion was joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.
In the Quiet Title Act of 1972, Congress waived the federal government’s immunity to being sued in order to determine the status of disputed property. When it did so, it conditioned this waiver on a 12-year statute of limitations, Thomas wrote.
“This Court has long construed such conditions on waivers of sovereign immunity as jurisdictional. And, it has acknowledged the jurisdictional nature of the Quiet Title Act’s statute of limitations in several precedents,” he added.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice for comment.
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