Court Opinion

ID: 8851094
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 17:13:33.038804+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:05:30.103883
License: Public Domain

LACOMBE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting). I am constrained to dissent from the opinion of the court. The case seems to me distinguishable from the authorities cited as to the tenant’s liability for rent when the landlord is a trespasser. This particular structure is illegal, not because the apparent owner has built it upon the land of another, who might, himself have built it, had he chosen so to do. It is a structure whose erection by any one, whether a private person or not, is expressly prohibited by the sovereign power. No mere failure to prosecute by the public officers whose duty it is to cause its removal can change its character. I concur with the statement in the opinion of the court that, although built on land belonging to the state, “the state has no claim against the claimants for wharf-age”; but I cannot see how the persons who put the obstruction there can have any better claim. Moreover, I do not think a court of admiralty should lend its aid to individuals who, not only without authority, but in flat defiance of the express orders of the state, have placed an obstruction to navigation in that part of a water way which has been reserved as a fair way for the vessels of all comers, and who seek to make a profit out of the transaction. If claimant had used so much of libelants’ structure as was lawfully erected, the case might be different; but, so far as the facts show, the Idlewild simply tied up at the outer end of the wharf, and did not use any part of it for a landing. I am unable to differentiate this case .from one where a private person, having driven two piles into the channel *607of a public watercourse six feet from shore (the state forbidding the placing of any such obstruction therein), should seek the aid of the court to recover compensation from a vessel which tied up to the piles, and which, had he not placed them there, might have anchored herself, bow and stern, in the same place.