Farm Partition Fence Law Upheld
Historically, if two rural landowners wanted to build a fence between their properties (a “partition fence”), they would meet in the middle of their proposed fencerow, and while looking at each other, each agree to build to their right. This century-old statute, known as the “Partition Fence Law,” was a way to distribute the cost of partition fences equally between landowners. Recently, this law was challenged in the Indiana Court of Appeals.
In Belork v. Latimer, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled the Indiana Partition Fence Law (Indiana Code §32-26-9) requires adjacent landowners to share the burden of building partition fences, as long as at least one property is agricultural land located outside town or city limits, regardless of whether both property owners benefit from or use the fence. The court relied, in part, on an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief filed by the Indiana Agricultural Law Foundation explaining the history, use and interpretation of the law.
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John Shoup
Indiana Agricultural Law Foundation, Inc.
Brianna J. Schroeder
Janzen Agricultural Law, LLC
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Brief on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes
By Mark Thornburg, INFB General Counsel and Brock Burnick, INFB Law Clerk
On May 31, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down their decision in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. This case involves the intersection of the Clean Water Act and its permitting requirements, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
When a landowner seeks to modify his or her land in a way that will “discharge” a pollutant (which includes soil or sediment (33 U.S.C. §1362(6)), he or she may be required to apply for a permit under the Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C. § 1311. The landowner can seek a “jurisdictional determination” to assess whether the cumbersome permit application is necessary (a process which can take multiple years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars). JDs are statements by the EPA/Corps that they have jurisdiction over the land use at issue because it has a “significant nexus” to a “navigable” “water of the United States,” as defined in the recent Final Rule on the Waters of the United States.
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