AI Generated Opinion Summaries

This summary was computer-generated without any editorial revision. It is not official, has not been checked for accuracy, and is NOT citable.

Facts

• In 2016, the Plaintiff purchased a landlocked forty-acre tract in Eddy County, New Mexico. To gain access, the Plaintiff sought a prescriptive easement over a pathway across the Defendant's adjoining land, claiming previous adverse use of the pathway for the required ten-year prescriptive period (para 2).

Procedural History

• [Not applicable or not found]

Parties' Submissions

• Plaintiff: Argued for a prescriptive easement over the Defendant's property, asserting that previous adverse use of a pathway met the requirement of continuous use for the ten-year prescriptive period necessary to establish such an easement (para 2).
• Defendant: [Not applicable or not found]

Legal Issues

• Whether the district court erred in applying a bright-line rule that bars users of land from obtaining a prescriptive easement in cases where the land is unenclosed and the landowner is aware of the use (para 1).

Disposition

• The district court's judgment in favor of the Defendant was reversed, and the case was remanded for further proceedings consistent with the appellate court's opinion (para 4).

Reasons

• The appellate court, led by Judge Zachary A. Ives, with Judges Jane B. Yohalem and Gerald E. Baca concurring, found that the district court erred in its application of the Hester rule. The district court had interpreted Hester to mean that all uses of unenclosed land by someone other than the owner are deemed permissive as a matter of law whenever the land’s owner knows of these uses. This interpretation was deemed incorrect as subsequent case law has limited the Hester rule to a narrower scope than adopted by the district court. The appellate court clarified that while Hester and its progeny allow for the consideration of barriers to entry and an owner’s knowledge of use in determining whether use is permissive or adverse, these factors are not determinative. The appellate court reversed the district court’s judgment and remanded the case for reconsideration of the Plaintiff’s claim in light of the correct interpretation of the law (paras 1-3).