Court Opinion

ID: 9812362
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 22:39:24.933889+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:24:51.394132
License: Public Domain

Douglas, J.,
dissenting. I do not think the real question at issue is correctly stated in the opinion of the Court, which assumes as a fact the ownership by the defendant of a right-of-way of two hundred feet in width. If the defendant railway company had actually condemned, or bought, or had given to it one hundred feet on each side of its track through the plaintiff's land the case would be different. I do not understand that there is any pretense that the defendant paid anything whatever for its right-of-way, or was actually given any more land than it actually occupied. Its only claim for two hundred feet of land seems to rest upon a naked presumption founded upon a legal fiction in an unpleaded private statute. If a neighbor asks me to give him a few roasting ears, and I tell him to help himself, am I to be held to have given away my entire corn crop ? Suppose the agents of a railroad company come to a generous citizen and say to him, “We want to go through your land; we will locate our track over one hundred feet from your house and so nearly on grade as to permit you to cross at any point without putting you to any discomfort or inconvenience,” and he should say, “Go ahead, I will not charge *659you for merely going through my land.” By what process of reasoning can such permission be construed into a grant under which the company, by altering its location and changing its grade, can take his land, injure his remaining property, and destroy his home? Oh, but it is said, he should have brought suit within two years. Brought suit for what ? lie had neither the right nor the inclination to bring suit for the land he had given to the railroad; and I am ignorant of any authority by which he could have brought suit for land which was claimed by no one else, and of which he alone was in actual and undisturbed possession adverse to all the world. I cannot bring myself to hold that the Legislature had either the power or the intention of taking the land of an individual and giving it to a corporation without compensation or the opportunity of obtaining it. Why should the corporation, the creature of the law, have any greater privileges than the citizen, the creator of the law?
I have no desire whatever to unnecessarily interfere in the slightest degree with the construction or operation of railroads, and I am aware that their public character and the proper performance of their public duties justify and require the exercise of certain powers and privileges not possessed by the individual. An instance is the exercise of the power of eminent domain inherent in the State as the concrete representative of the sovereign people. But all such privileges, given alone for the public benefit, are subordinate to the public welfare, and must be exercised with due regard to the inherent and inalienable rights of the individual. If they need his land let them take it, but let them pay for it. Let them take it openly and fairly so that he may know what they claim, and let them pay for it, not in legal fictions or irrebutable presumptions, but in money or money’s worth. In the words of the Court of Appeals of New York, “Take, but pay.” The plaintiff is not seeking to prevent the defend*660ant from changing the location and grade of its track, but simply to obtain compensation for tbe additional injury done to bim by such change. My views upon these questions are fully expressed in my dissenting opinion in Jones v. Comrs., 130 N. C., 457, and Dargan v. Railroad, 131 N. C., 626, wherein I have attempted to discuss principles which to me seem to underlie the foundations of our government.