Court Opinion

ID: 9575067
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:11:11.596381+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:47:54.165609
License: Public Domain

ELLETT, Justice
(dissenting).
I concur in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Maughan with the exception that I do not think the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution gives any rights to anybody.1 Our own State Constitution gives all the redress one needs against any lack of Due Process.2 The ordinance in question provides:
Section 3-13-2. Real property to be kept clean. It shall be unlawful for any person, corporation, partnership, or legal entity owning or occupying any real property in the unincorporated area of Utah County to fail to control the growth of injurious and noxious weeds on such property or to fail to remove from such property any such weeds or any refuse and any unsightly or dele-tericms objects or structures upon notice from Utah County as provided in this chapter. [Emphasis added.]
Unsightliness, like beauty, exists only in the eye of the beholder. A hop toad is not unsightly to another hop toad.
If one must remove unsightly objects should he be permitted to keep a Corvette automobile ? How about his mother-in-law ? Must she go> too? Of course, my mother-in-law is beautiful (to me), but the agent of the defendant might disagree and think she was unsightly. Who draws the line and where is it to be drawn.
Beauty and unsightliness are each incapable of a definition which would permit them to be categorized. I therefore dissent.

. See my opinion in Dyett v. Turner, 20 Utah 2d 403, 439 P.2d 266 (1968).

. Art. I, Sec. 7.