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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

They may not be citing specific law, but instead generally describing the spirit of a broad set of such laws.

then essentially it's unenforceable, so no I don't want that in the states.

fair to me means "not one inch across my property line"

i think "not one inch across my property line" makes sense, but there is still a problem to resolve regarding access to public land. in particular the article describes a problem with public land being inaccessible except through "corner crossing".

The solution is simple. Land owners should just be required to grant access to public land they border.

If you don't like that, don't buy property that borders public land.

Virtually every property borders public land of some kind (a public road right of way, typically). It might be interesting to minimally specify what it means to allow access in a way that doesn't allow virtually any path across one's land. You can't just require allowance from any other border directly to the nearest border of public land, for this reason (could be through the owner's house or garden). One way might be to require the specification of public traversal areas as part of the title. Or 100m around the edges of every property is traversable.

Specifying some minimum property size should cover most cases, as well as specifying land uses that are or are not covered by the requirement for public access.

If you own a large parcel of land but are actively farming it, I think disallowing public access is reasonable. If you own hundreds of acres of wilderness, I think public access to traverse the wild areas of your property is perfectly reasonable, even light camping with reasonable restrictions. Specific issues can be prosecuted individually, instead of a blanket ban on all public access.

Well said

In the US we accomplish this in a lot of location with easements, common easements are for utilities, but easements can be for anything including transit to other parcels.

Easements means the ownership is maintained however access is granted for VERY VERY specific things, (like putting in and maintaining utilities, or transit across ) but can not be used for other things (like camping)

Incorrect. Broadly-defined laws that do not hammer out the specifics to the inch are absolutely enforceable, just not with perfect certainty ahead of time. All laws are imprecise, and judges and juries are well able to operate more flexibly than a rigid programming-style logical interpretation (IF position X WITHIN bounds Y-Z THEN arrest) would allow.

Yes. In my experience, technical people often assume that laws and judges act like programming commands, when in reality it's more like a case-by-case assessment from the point of view of a reasonable person. Judges are not stupid, they understand what "fair distance" would mean.

How so? Specific laws might define specific distances. The spirit of the law is some reasonable distance, and the letter of a specific implementation of such a law might define a distance, which you could demarcate on your property if it were an issue, much like people may demarcate the boundaries of their property if trespass is an issue today.

> fair to me means "not one inch across my property line"

Then the compromise should be that vast wilderness can’t be privately owned.

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