Court Opinion

ID: 9588531
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:35:21.632109+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:00:59.395912
License: Public Domain

UDALL, Justice
(dissenting).
The majority has shocked my conscience by ordering the reopening of an old, unsightly, wasteful, open irrigation ditch down the center of a “blacktop” public street, dedicated in a newly platted subdivision, just to satisfy the whim of plaintiff, who, as I see it, stands on a bare legal right. This is particularly true when the defendants by an expenditure of $1500 have provided plaintiff with a covered and adequate, modern, concrete tile pipeline from the same intake to the identical point of discharge.
It was Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts who said that “The ultimate object of all laws and of all jurisprudence is to do justice between parties.” The experienced and learned trial judge found: “There is no room for argument on the proposition that plaintiff is in an infinitely better position by reason of the existence of the concrete pipe through which to irrigate his premises than he was through an open ditch, and there is not the slightest question but that the pipe line has enhanced the value of the property in the eyes of any purchaser in the event he wishes to sell.”
It is my view that without doing violence to the rules or weakening the authority of positive law, this court, under its broad equitable powers, could find a way of doing justice between the parties without perpetuating for all time an archaic and dangerous instrumentality of irrigation. It should be remembered that the judgment now affirmed prohibits, in effect, Maricopa County, the owner in fee, from ever covering this open ditch.
One can have but little patience with either the thoughtlessness or poor judgment exercised by defendants on the one hand or the unyielding stubbornness of the plaintiffs in demanding their pound of flesh, on the other. But neither attitude is a justification for this court’s conceding its impotence to do the equitable and fair thing which the situation demands.
At this crossroad I favor following the path marked out by the enlightened decision of the Supreme Court of Colorado in the case of Brown v. Bradbury, 110 Colo. 537, 135 P.2d 1013, which course, in this instance, would lead to an approval of defendants’ modern method of conveying irrigation water to plaintiffs’ land in a scientifically constructed tile conduit laid underground, even though the pipe line be 26 feet distant from the original ditch line.
For these reasons I register my dissent.