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.

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.

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.

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.

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. For that to occur – and it very rarely occurs – it has to be legally or practically impossible to give to the parties' agreement any sensible content.

That required a consideration of the February conveyance in the context of the surrounding circumstances in which it was granted, and having regard also to any evidence properly admissible for the purposes of its interpretation. It is, however, fundamental that the parcels clause in a conveyance should not be considered in isolation from the remainder of the document.