The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 39, No. 3 12 CONTRASTING BOUNDARIES genuinely appreciative of the cooperative steps that had been taken by the former combatants, to eectively resolve their own fundamentally ambiguous and problematic boundary in a mutually benecial manner. As previously indicated herein, and as the 2014 SCOTUS decree demonstrates, the primary judicial emphasis, whenever any court is confronted with a scenario involving boundary resolution, is typically on boundary stability, and for that reason any action taken by the litigants themselves to put the matter in repose, by means of agreement upon any particular boundary location, will typically prevail and be given legal eect. For land surveyors in particular, acknowledging that the 2014 SCOTUS decree in question represents judicial ratication of an agreed boundary of a unique variety is a key factor in reaching a proper appreciation of the virtue and value which are embodied in both the agreement itself and the process through which it obtained judicial approval. e principal source of disagreement between the esteemed professionals who have publicly commented on this matter relates to the integrity of the methodology that was employed in the coordination of the California OSB, and also to the potential future repercussions of the judicial approval of that methodology. In that regard, it must be recognized that in a typical boundary agreement scenario, involving the owners of typical private properties, the role of the land surveyor is narrowly limited, to properly documenting the agreed boundary location through the use of his or her professional expertise, since only the parties themselves hold the authority to select and agree upon the actual location, thus the surveyor plays no role in the location selection process. In the OSB scenario however, the agreeing parties are not typical private land owners, with no capacity to properly document their own agreement, they are governmental organizations, which employ well qualied professionals, who are fully capable of implementing appropriate methodology for boundary documentation purposes. erefore, whenever any such entities agree upon a means of dening the physical limits of the jurisdiction of each entity, and they also agree upon methodology that is mutually satisfactory to them, for the purpose of documenting their agreement, the chosen methodology represents a fundamental component of the agreement itself, and the entirety of the agreement, including the means by which it is to be implemented, is judicially presumed to have been competently developed and documented. us we can plainly see that in reality the coordinated portions of the OSB have no nefarious or detrimental ramications for any property rights lying along or associated with any coastline, in California or elsewhere, because the activity which periodically motivates the coordination of various portions of that boundary bears no relation at all to the title issues or the riparian principles that control the fate and the physical extent of all coastal properties. In fact it is legally impossible for the coordinated alignment approved by SCOTUS in 2014 to have any controlling eect beyond that which it was intended to have, and the clear intent of both of the parties to this case, and of the Court as well, on this occasion was simply to more eectively dene Congressionally mandated jurisdictional limits, by establishing a more readily identiable line at which state jurisdiction gives way to federal jurisdiction. Moreover, given the well-known rule of law and equity that no judicial decree pertaining to title can ever have any adverse impact upon any rights held by any party or entity who took no part in the litigation, the outcome of this case has no direct impact whatsoever upon any form of privately held title residing upon any California tidal lands or lying anywhere landward of the tidal zone, nor does it alter or even threaten to alter the location of any boundaries thereof. erefore, this SCOTUS decree presents no direct or immediate source of concern for either property owners residing in such areas or land surveyors working in such areas. In truth, the development of the coordinated OSB alignment was implicitly armative of the valuable contribution to our society that is made by land surveyors, since it represented a major investment of public funds supporting extensive survey work, and thus operated as a means of job creation for both surveyors and survey technicians over a period of several years. Yet it cannot be said that there is no genuine basis at all for any type of concern regarding the future consequences of this 2014 SCOTUS decree, because not every judicial decree is fully understood or properly leveraged by subsequent generations. Any one of the several existing OSB cases which have resulted in the production and judicial approval of legal descriptions that are wholly dependent upon coordinates could eventually be judicially cited as justication for elevating measurement based control to a position of primacy in the realm of boundary demarcation. It is quite possible that future courts will become more inclined to support measurement based control, and less inclined to honor physically established boundaries, and the OSB cases do tend to point in that direction. As previously noted, these cases are distinctly non-typical and are thus clearly judicially distinguishable from upland boundary cases and typical riparian boundary cases as well, because the monumentation options available when dealing with a permanently submerged boundary do not equate to those found anywhere else in our world. We have also seen however, that there was some degree of inherent conict involved in the evolution of the coordinated OSB, as rightly suggested in the original March 2015 article, regarding the relevance of various boundary principles to a line of that kind, emanating from diering perspectives upon the true nature and purpose
PLSO May June 2016
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