Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Does notoriously blocking a way erase a prescriptive easement? A truly absent California landowner's property was used as a trail from c1910 until 1993. At that time the adjoining property owners collaborated to build a fence, successfully blocking the trail. By 2010 what has happened to the public's prior prescriptive trail easement? Should good faith efforts by a trail group fail to result in removal of the fence, what's next? Do the adjoining owners have a clear right to keep it? If the trail group notoriously removed the fence, is there a likely commission of a crime (other than trespass on the absent landowners property)?


Asked on 12/11/10, 12:15 am

1 Answer from Attorneys
Craig Collins Craig M. Collins, Esq.

Very interesting question. I cannot tell from your description tell whether the fence that blocks the trail was placed there by the person who owns the land on which the trail is placed? If so, the landowner of the land which underlies the trail might have extinguished the prescriptive easement by adversely possessing the land since 1993. Of course, all of the elements of adverse possession would have to have been met.

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Answered on 12/16/10, 12:00 pm


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