California Surveyors Forums

Jerry Taylor, Program Coordinator for the Surveying and Mapping Sciences degree program at East Tennessee State University, will join host Curt Sumner to discuss his perspectives on “Mediation Opportunities for the Surveying Profession”. A quote from a recent paper by Mr. Taylor states, “Surveyors are not and cannot be judicial officers, but in a great many cases they act in a quasi-judicial capacity with the acquiescense of parties concerned”.

good quote.

Actually an oft-repeated quote originally penned by Thomas Cooley, Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court in the late 1800s. This quote comes from a presentation he made at the annual conference of the Michigan society of Professional Engineers and Surveyors (not the exact title of the group, but close enough) in, if I recall correctly, about 1893, not long after the decision of Diehl v Zanger came out in which he expressed several of the same sentiments in the Court's opinion.

Principles and quotes reflecting the principles that came out of, or were best articulated to date in that opinion have become some of the most referenced principles and quotes throughout the body of boundary dispute cases since then, across most jurisdictions in the US, right up through fairly recent decisions.

Even so, a great many surveyors are fearful of ever assuming that quasi-judicial role, and many will argue that Cooley's expression of these principles is incorrect, not applicable to xxxx jurisdiction, or are otherwise not useful.

Anytime a surveyor must consider the weight of conflicting evidence and then makes a decision to identify lines and points as representing the boundary according to one or the other, that surveyor has acted in a quasi-judicial capacity. The conflict does not need to be large to be a conflict, it only needs to exist.

Whether you determine a boundary with consideration of all available evidence, only with respect to the physical evidence, or only with respect to the documentary evidence (or only a portion of any type of evidence), you have made a quasi-judicial decision (more likely a series of such decisions) that, in most cases will not be challenged whether you decided it right or wrong.

In that respect, you become the de facto 1st level court of competent jurisdiction and your ruling will stand until and unless anyone decides to challenge it by appealing to the 1st level of the judicial system.

Whether or not one chooses to acknowledge the fact, the surveyor stands as investigator, counsel, judge and jury each time he or she makes a representaion of a boundary, in that it is the surveyor who investigates and gathers the facts, it is the surveyor that considers the various outcomes the facts suggest, it is the surveyor who decides what the facts conclude with respect to boundary location, and it is the surveyor who makes the determination known to the parties involved.

Just because you don't wear a robe to the office or in the field doesn't mean you're not filling the role. And since you are, it behooves you to locate the original lines of the boundary being retraced according to the same rules that a court with jurisdiction to review your survey is bound by when they determine where those original lines most likely existed.