Court Opinion

ID: 9547785
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:52:24.146176+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:18:06.192459
License: Public Domain

RABINOWITZ, Justice
(concurring in part and dissenting in part).
The court states that the rationale of the shorter seven-year period of AS 09.25.050 “is most logically attributable to a belief that a person holding land under color of title will be more likely to make improvements and otherwise commit himself to that land.” In my view, the holding of the majority opinion is inconsistent with this rationale. Without going into any issue of good faith, which I agree should be a prerequisite to establishment of a claim under AS 09.25.050, it appears to me that the gist of the court’s holding is that an adverse claimant under color of title can obtain the benefit of the shorter period by means of a conveyance to a third person and reconveyance.
Such a result strikes me as being contrary to the policy reasons for granting an adverse claimant the benefit of the shorter period. For in my view, it is not disposi-tive of the issue in the case at bar that the form of the instruments used by Burnie Garland and the Title Insurance and Trust Company purported to pass title and adequately described the property in question. The crucial question here is whether the person claiming under color of title would have been more likely to make improvements and otherwise commit himself to the land because of his reliance upon an instrument purporting to create color of title. Given the factual context of this record, I cannot conceive that Burnie Garland made improvements or otherwise further committed himself to the land in question in reliance upon the reconveyance from the Title Insurance and Trust Company. Under the bootstrap circumstances of the case, I fail to discern any persuasive policy reasons for holding that a claimant’s color of title under AS 09.25.050 commences from the point in time that he receives a reconveyance of land to which he never previously held the title.1
I agree with the court’s statement that it is impermissible for a claimant to create color of title in himself through a straw-man transaction. But I entertain reservations as to whether the newly adopted “concomitant presumption of good faith” will further this end. In my view, adoption of a presumption of good faith in the circumstances of the case at bar, and in all future similar circumstances, creates a distinction which will prove difficult to administer and will emasculate the good-faith-of-claimant prophylactic under AS 09.25.050.
On the particular facts of this case, I believe that the seven-year period must be measured from the time the Eagle River First Baptist Church exercised its option to purchase. Since the record is silent on this issue, I would remand for further evidence and findings of fact and conclusions of law on this point.

. In this regard, I believe the majority’s reliance upon Tibbetts v. Holway, 119 Me. 90, 109 A. 382 (1920), is inapposite. In that case, there is no suggestion that the claim of color of title was grounded upon a reconveyance such as occurred in the case at bar.