This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land: The Keys to Unlocking Eight Million Acres of Checkerboarded Public Land

The term “checkerboarded land” has become associated with alternating public and private square-mile lots in Western states such as Wyoming, Colorado, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. In the mid-19th century, the United States was in the throes of Manifest Destiny. President Abraham Lincoln signed the 1862 Pacific Railway Act which aimed to connect the eastern United States with the newly acquired western territories by developing the Transcontinental Railroad. As an incentive for building the rail line, the federal government granted the even-numbered one-square-mile sections of land to the railroad companies, while retaining the odd-numbered one-square-mile sections for itself. The Federal Land & Management Act of 1976 makes public land, specifically land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), accessible to the public for recreation. Of the 2.4 billion acres of land in the United States, the BLM manages over 240 million surface acres and roughly 60% is privately owned. Before analyzing the legal problems and recent developments on checkerboarded land, it is essential to understand how these sections of land came to be and why they exist in this way. Section II will briefly discuss the history of the property landscape and the conflicting interests of private landownership versus publicly accessible land. It will then delve into the landmark case of Iron Bar Holdings, LLC. v. Cape, a case of first impression that may be the first of many corner-crossing cases. Subsequently, I will address some of the primary conflicting interests in this decision and the key legal principles undermining this area of the law. Following that, I will discuss outcomes from the case, outlining the current state of the law and identifying its pitfalls. In Section III, I will then explore where the law should progress and offer solutions to resolve the problem of checkerboarded lands.