Court Opinion

ID: 9766642
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:55:53.880675+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:24.412324
License: Public Domain

RAKER, Judge, dissenting:
The majority holds today that Md.Code (1977), § 8-309 of the Transportation Article abrogated the common law Rule *682Against Perpetuities with respect to original owners’ rights of repurchase in land sold to the State Highway Administration (SHA). That is, the majority concludes that § 8-309 conferred upon SHA and private parties the ability to create, by contract or conveyance, rights of repurchase that might not vest until more than twenty-one years after some life then in being. Because I do not believe that the plain language of § 8-309 creates such an ability, because I do not believe that any such ability arises from the statutory rights created by § 8-309, and because I do not believe the common law should be abrogated by implication, I dissent.
In my view, the 1978 version of § 8-309 would only conflict with the common law Rule if it expressly permitted SHA or private parties to create perpetual contingent interests by contract or conveyance. The plain language of the statute does nothing of the sort. Rather, it charges SHA with the duty to dispose of excess land from completed-or abandoned highway projects. In the case of abandoned projects, it dictates that the first right to reacquire the land should be given to the original owner or to that person’s successor in interest. The statute does not exclude land which had been purchased before enactment, nor does it provide any guarantee that.land purchased subsequent to enactment will be available for repurchase should the statute be later repealed. Thus, any right of repurchase created by § 8-309 is of a very different character than a right of repurchase created by contract or deed. It is a right conferred by the Legislature, based on its findings of public policy1, and repealable at will.
In my view, if § 8-309 had created a statutory perpetual contingent right of repurchase, then the repurchase agreement in the contract and deed would have been unnecessary. If persons who sold land to the Department of Transportation in 1978 continued to enjoy such a right despite the later modification of § 8-309, then the present action for breach of *683contract, declaration of rights under a contract, and specific performance of a contract would not be necessary. If the statutory right persisted, Mrs. Selig could have brought an action to enforce it, and would be entitled to an injunction to stop the auction, as well as a writ of mandamus ordering the Secretary to convey the property to her. But Mrs. Selig no doubt recognized, when filing her complaint, that she had no statutory basis for relief. The statutory right of repurchase that § 8-309 contained in 1978 no longer existed when its conditions were arguably satisfied in 2003. Rather, Mrs. Selig is entitled to relief only if the 1978 contract or deed effectively created a contingent right for her to repurchase the property. The interest which those documents purported to create, however, violated the common law Rule Against Perpetituties, and there is no language in § 8-309 to suggest that either the State or a private party could validly contract or convey such an interest.
Furthermore, even if § 8-309 conferred contingent interests of potentially infinite duration upon a certain class of individuals, the majority points to no principle of law which would require that any time a government confers some interest upon its citizens by statute, a correlative ability to create that interest by contract or conveyance necessarily arises. Indeed, such a result is contrary to experience. Governments may give citizens the right to inspect public documents, the right to use deadly force, or the right to vote for public officials. All of these rights may be created by statute; all would be patently void as provisions of a contract or deed.
Because the enactment of § 8-309 did not, in my view, abrogate the common law Rule Against Perpetuities by direct conflict or as some species of required corollary, the only remaining possibility is that the statute and the Rule are doctrinally inconsistent at some more abstract level, and that we should therefore find the Rule abrogated by implication. We have often reiterated the “generally accepted rule of law that statutes are not presumed to repeal the common law ‘further than is expressly declared, and that a statute, made in the affirmative without any negative expressed or implied, *684does not take away the common law.’ ” Robinson v. State, 353 Md. 683, 693, 728 A.2d 698, 702 (1999) (quoting Lutz v. State, 167 Md. 12, 15, 172 A. 354, 356 (1934)). While an exception to this canon of interpretation exists “[w]here a statute and the common law are in conflict, or where a statute deals with an entire subject-matter,” Robinson at 693, 728 A.2d at 702, neither is the case in the statute sub judiee.

. Section 8-309(a) states: "The purpose of this section is to return unneeded land to the tax rolls of the counties and to make this land available for use by private enterprise.”