Court Opinion

ID: 9697829
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:32:41.479016+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:35.718588
License: Public Domain

RUDMAN, Justice,
with whom ROBERTS, Justice, joins, dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
There is no question that the deed from Annette and Robert McCormack to James and Agnes Milligan is ambiguous. In such instances, the trial court must look to the standard rules of construction to determine the grantor’s intent. Theriault v. Murray, 588 A.2d 720, 721-22 (Me.1991). According to these rules, boundaries are controlled by, in descending priority, monuments, course, distances, and quantity unless this produces a result that is absurd or manifestly inconsistent with the parties’intentions. Taylor v. Hanson, 541 A.2d 155, 158 (Me.1988). The result achieved by the trial court and affirmed by the court is, in my mind, absurd and results from a mechanistic application of the rule.
In 1969, Robert and Annette McCormack conveyed portions of their Lake Messalon-skee property to their grandsons and their grandsons’ spouses. A year later, the McCormacks conveyed the remainder of their property which included their homestead to their daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter reserving to themselves a life estate in the property. Subsequent to the conveyances, the family, including the McCormacks, continued to operate their beachfront recreational facility as they had in the past. It seems logical to me that had the McCormacks intended that the beachfront recreational facility and the property upon which it is situate be conveyed to their nineteen-year-old grandson, James, and his wife; Agnes, that they would have reserved a life estate in that property. The result arrived at by the Superior Court transfers the shore front*479age, together with the concession building and changing rooms, to James and Agnes without title to or an easement to use the road leading from the Pond Road to the beach and creates a gore between James’ property and the property conveyed to James’ parents and his sister. The trial court based its decision on the assumption that the McCormacks desired to treat their grandchildren equally, and that the McCor-macks, in 1969, placed a higher value on shore frontage as opposed to road frontage. Neither assumption is necessarily correct. As the court states, the plaintiffs’ surveyor suggested a result which makes sense, and although there was evidence supporting the trial court’s decision to adopt the construction suggested by James and Agnes Milligan, such a construction overlooks the limiting clause contained within the rules of construction.