Boundary Dispute in UK Law

It follows that if it becomes necessary to establish the exact boundary, the deeds will almost invariably have to be supplemented by such inferences as may be drawn from topographical features which existed, or may be supposed to have existed, when the conveyances were executed.

Leaving aside all possibility of embarrassment in our foreign relations (which it can be said not to have been drawn to the attention of the court by the executive) there are - to follow the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals - no judicial or manageable standards by which to judge these issues, or to adopt another phrase (from a passage not quoted), the court would be in a judicial no-man's land: the court would be asked to review transactions in which four sovereign states were involved, which they had brought to a precarious settlement, after diplomacy and the use of force, and to say that at least part of these were "unlawful" under international law.

It seems to me that the reason why it is necessary for the protected class of goods to be clearly defined, or defined with reasonable precision, is because the goodwill that the tort seeks to protect is a species of property. The boundaries are needed in order to delineate both what is protected and also who shares in the ownership of the protected subject matter. The action in passing off is directed against those who cross the boundary.

Looking at evidence of the actual and known physical condition of the relevant land at the date of the conveyance and having the attached plan in your hand on the spot when you do this are permitted as an exercise in construing the conveyance against the background of its surrounding circumstances. They include knowledge of the objective facts reasonably available to the parties at the relevant date.

Parties are always disagreeing about the contracts which they make. They take those arguments, if necessary, to the courts, or to arbitration, for their resolution: and sometimes the resolution is very difficult indeed to arrive at. That is equally true of disputes as to the meaning of contracts and of disputes as to the application of contracts to the facts and of disputes as to the proper understanding of the facts.

The second insight, however, is that, whether the sovereign acts within his own territory or outside it, there is a certain class of sovereign act which calls for judicial restraint on the part of our municipal courts. In essence, the principle of non-justiciability seeks to distinguish disputes involving sovereign authority which can only be resolved on a state to state level from disputes which can be resolved by judicial means.

In such a case, the scope of the dispute provides a limiting background context to the document. It is easy to infer that although the parties used very wide language - "all claims" and so forth - they meant all claims arising out of the matters in dispute. It would go without saying that they were not intending to include claims of an altogether different character. In 1861 the railway company used its statutory powers to buy some of Mr Blackmore's land for railway purposes.