All posts by Jeff Lucas
Surveyors and Appellate Court Opinions
Why should we care about appellate court opinions? I have had this question posed to me on numerous occasions. I suppose it has its roots in the old surveyor’s saw: “We don’t need to read court decisions, because you can never know what the judge is going to do.” While this may have a grain...
Legal Boundaries: The Ultimate Issue
What is the “Ultimate Issue Rule” in civil litigation? The Ultimate Issue Rule refers to Rule 704 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. The Federal Rules of Evidence (the Rules) were submitted to Congress by the Supreme Court in 1973, approved and enacted in 1975. They were intended to bring uniformity across all federal courts...
Rewriting Legal Descriptions
What’s up with rewriting legal descriptions? There seems to be a growing push from the title companies to have legal descriptions rewritten for little or no good reason. In my 38 years as a licensed surveyor I can remember but a few instances when rewriting a metes and bounds description was truly warranted and recommended,...
Policing the Profession
In my last column we touched on the idea of “unchecked incompetent practice” and how that is a problem for the land surveying profession. This time around we are going to dive a little deeper with that idea. In a 1969 article entitle “The Professional Status of Land Surveyors,” Curtis Brown wrote, “professional liability is...
Incompetence V. Negligence
Do incompetence and negligence mean the same thing? If you check standard references on torts, it seems that while negligence is a stand-alone tort (a civil wrong), incompetence is not. Incompetence is sometimes referred to as an element of the tort of negligence and incompetents are sometimes put away for their own good and the...
