PROPERTY LAW
Angela Sbano
In Seater v. Estate of Seater, the Alaska Supreme Court held that a superior court judge misinterpreted a different superior court judge’s decision when she stated that it required a property owner to remove all boulders he had placed on his property below the “extreme high water line” rather than the mean high water line. In 2012, Lee Seater and Ronald Seater had their property, previously held as tenants in common, partitioned into two approximately equal lots. Later that year, Ronald received an express easement for ingress and egress over Lee’s property. In 2015, Lee was granted a reciprocal easement, with instructions from the superior court that neither side could block the paths of ingress and egress for the purpose of denying the use of the easement. Then, in 2016, Lee moved for an enforcement of the easement, arguing that Ronald had placed boulders in the path to frustrate her use. In 2017, the superior court ordered Ronald to remove the boulders he had placed below the “high water line” without further instruction as to where that line was. After Lee again moved for an enforcement of the easement, a second judge, reviewing the first judge’s 2017 order, held that he intended the high water line to mean the “extreme” high water line. On appeal, the court reasoned that the first judge repeatedly (though inconsistently) used words like ‘median’ and ‘mean’ when describing the high water line in his order. Accordingly, the supreme court vacated the second judge’s opinion, holding that the first judge intended the cutoff point to be the mean high water line, not the extreme high water line.
