Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States

No. 12-1173. Argued January 14, 2014. Decided March 10, 2014. Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Judgment reversed and case remanded (496 Federal Appendix 822, reversed and remanded). Opinion of the Court by Chief Justice Roberts, in which Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, and Kagan joined. Justice Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion.

Editorial note. In 1908 the United States granted the Laramie, Hahn's Peak and Pacific Railway Company a right of way across land in the Medicine Bow National Forest under the General Railroad Right-of-Way Act of 1875. In 1976 the United States patented an eighty-three acre parcel crossed by that right of way to the Brandts' predecessor; the patent expressly conveyed the land subject to the railroad's rights but said nothing about what would happen if the railroad ceased to use them. The railroad's successor obtained authority to abandon the line, removed the track and ties, and in 2004 the abandonment was completed. The United States then brought suit to quiet title to the abandoned strip in itself.

Editorial note. The District Court granted summary judgment for the United States, and the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed, holding that the United States retained a reversionary interest. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded.

Editorial note. The 1875 Act granted an easement and nothing more. The rule derived is that a common-law easement terminates upon abandonment, and the owner of the underlying fee then holds the land unburdened; the grantor of an easement retains no reversionary interest capable of ripening into possession, because an easement is not an estate carved out of the fee with a possibility of reverter. The Government's contrary position was foreclosed by its own successful argument in Great Northern Railway Co. v. United States, 315 U.S. 262 (1942), where it had persuaded the Court that the 1875 Act conveyed only an easement.

Editorial note. Chief Justice Roberts began from Great Northern, which construed the 1875 Act after a change in congressional policy away from outright grants of land to railroads, and held that the statute conveyed an easement for railroad purposes only. He observed that the Government had prevailed on precisely that reading and now sought the benefit of the opposite one, and he declined to divide the statute's operation according to which party the construction favoured. He then applied the ordinary consequences of the easement classification: the servient owner's title is presently possessory and merely burdened; abandonment of the easement removes the burden; and the grantor's interest, having been fully conveyed away by the patent, does not revive. Statutes providing for the disposition of railroad rights of way, chiefly the Act of March 8, 1922, were held to presuppose rather than alter that classification. Justice Sotomayor, dissenting, argued that railroad rights of way had long been treated as sui generis and that Great Northern had resolved only the question of subsurface rights, leaving the reversionary question open.

Editorial note. Brandt is a demonstration, on a very large practical scale, of the consequences that follow from classifying an interest correctly. The classification of the 1875 Act grants as easements determines the ownership of thousands of miles of abandoned railroad corridors, and therefore the legal foundation of the rails-to-trails programme, the exposure of the United States to compensation claims by adjoining owners, and the title position of every purchaser of land crossed by a former line. For the treatise the case belongs both to the law of easements — creation, scope, and termination by abandonment — and to the chapters on public land grants and on title assurance.

Editorial note. Followed. Applied in the Court of Federal Claims and the Federal Circuit in adjudicating takings claims arising from the conversion of abandoned corridors to trail use, and relied on generally for the proposition that abandonment of an easement leaves the fee unburdened in the servient owner.

Editorial note. Read with the General Railroad Right-of-Way Act of 1875, 43 U.S.C. §§ 934-939 (repealed in part), and the treatise chapters on easements, on termination of servitudes, and on public land grants and patents.