## Facts

- Levi Edwards and others owned land containing the entrance to the Great Onyx Cave and operated the cave as a tourist attraction.
- Fielding Lee owned nearby surface land, about a quarter mile from the cave entrance.
- A survey suggested that portions of the Great Onyx Cave system extended beneath Lee’s land.
- Lee sued Edwards in equity, claiming Lee owned the portion of the cave located under Lee’s surface tract, seeking (1) relief against continued subsurface trespass and (2) a share of past proceeds tied to Edwards’s exhibition of the cave.
- To determine whether and where the cave passages ran beneath Lee’s tract, the Edmonson Circuit Court (Judge N. P. Sims) entered a preliminary order directing surveyors to enter upon and under the parties’ lands and survey/map the cave.
- Edwards attempted to appeal the survey order, but the Kentucky Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal as premature because the order was interlocutory.
- Edwards then filed an original proceeding in the Court of Appeals seeking a writ of prohibition to prevent Judge Sims from enforcing the survey order (and from holding Edwards in contempt for noncompliance), claiming the order unlawfully invaded Edwards’s property, possession, and privacy and would cause irreparable harm before any final appeal.

## Issues

1. Whether the circuit court lacked jurisdiction or authority to order a survey requiring entry into and under Edwards’s land to map the cave system.
2. If the circuit court had jurisdiction, whether ordering and enforcing the cave survey was such an erroneous use of power that it would cause great injustice and irreparable injury with no adequate remedy by appeal, justifying a writ of prohibition under § 110 of the Kentucky Constitution.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeals denied the writ of prohibition.
- The circuit court had jurisdiction over the parties and the subject matter of the property and trespass dispute.
- A court sitting in equity may order a reasonable, court-controlled inspection or survey of property when needed to gather facts necessary to decide competing claims, including claims involving subsurface features such as caves.
- The survey order did not show the type of great injustice and irreparable injury that warrants prohibition; any error in granting or executing the order could be reviewed after a final judgment.

## Legal Principles

- Under § 110 of the Kentucky Constitution, a writ of prohibition may issue only:
  - when a lower court is acting without jurisdiction and there is no remedy by appeal; or
  - when the lower court has jurisdiction but is about to act erroneously in a way that will cause great injustice and irreparable injury, and there is no adequate remedy by appeal or otherwise.
- In land disputes, ownership generally reaches above and below the surface (often stated as ownership “to the sky and to the depths”), subject to recognized limits and to the rights of others.
- Equity courts may permit entry for inspection, measurement, or survey of an opposing party’s property, when the requesting party presents a bona fide claim and the inspection is reasonably necessary to determine facts that cannot be reliably obtained by other means.
- A temporary, supervised survey ordered for litigation purposes is ordinarily treated as an evidentiary step rather than a taking of possession; inconvenience or limited interference, standing alone, typically does not qualify as irreparable injury for extraordinary-writ relief.
- Interlocutory trial-management orders are normally reviewed through appeal after final judgment, not through original writ practice, unless the strict requirements for prohibition are met.

## Conclusion

Edwards v. Sims held that prohibition would not lie to stop enforcement of a trial court’s preliminary order directing a survey of the Great Onyx Cave to determine whether portions of the cave extended beneath a neighbor’s land, because the circuit court had jurisdiction and could, in equity, authorize a limited and supervised subsurface survey to obtain evidence for resolving ownership, boundary, trespass, and profits claims, with any alleged error left for review on appeal after final judgment.


Edwards v. Sims, 232 Ky. 791, 24 S.W.2d 619 (1929)