Court Opinion

ID: 9566797
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:43:12.756662+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:41:59.673398
License: Public Domain

Gunter, Justice,
dissenting. I think the trial court’s judgment in this case was correct and it should be affirmed. I am in disagreement with Division 5 of the majority opinion and the corresponding partial reversal of the trial court’s judgment.
This record shows that the appellants encroached upon an unimproved subdivision lot which did not belong to them by constructing their driveway on it. The lot of the appellants and the adjacent lot encroached upon by them both fronted on a public street.
The contention of the appellants is that they have acquired a private way over the adjacent subdivision lot by maintaining their driveway on it for a period of approximately fifteen years.
Code § 85-1401 provides in pertinent part as follows: "The right of private way over another’s land may arise from ... prescription by seven years’ uninterrupted use through improved lands, or twenty years’ use over wild lands; . . .”
The evidence in this case showed without dispute that no improvements were constructed on the adjacent, encroached upon subdivision lot by the owner thereof until after E. B. Burney Construction Company acquired title to it and began construction *780of a house in 1973.
It is my position that for one to acquire a prescriptive easement across an unimproved subdivision lot, the period of prescription, where the prescriber has no color of title as in this case, must exist for twenty years or longer.
An unimproved subdivision lot is not, in my opinion, "improved lands” as those words are used in Code § 85-1401.
It is inconceivable to me that this court can hold that one encroaching upon a vacant, unimproved subdivision lot for a period of less than twenty years, the encroacher having no color of title as here, can acquire any right or interest, easement or private way in that portion of the vacant, unimproved lot encroached upon.
Possession to be the foundation of a prescription must be in the right of the possessor and must be accompanied by a claim of right. See Code § 85-402. I recognize that adverse possession of lands, under written evidence of title, for seven years can be a basis for prescriptive title (Code § 85-407), but there is no written evidence of title to the lot encroached upon in this case.
In 1872 in the case of McKay v. Kendrick, 44 Ga. 607 (2), this court said: "If, at the time his grantor makes the deed to him, such grantor, by accident or design, points out more land than the largest description in the deed will embrace, and the defendant takes possession of the whole tract so pointed out, he is in, as to the overplus, only by the pedis possessio, and cannot set up prescriptive title as to that part unless he has so held it for twenty years.”
I can find no issue of fact for jury determination in this case; and I would therefore affirm the judgment of the trial court in its entirety.
I respectfully dissent.