## Facts

- Congress subsidized construction of the transcontinental railroad through the Union Pacific Act of 1862 by granting the railroad alternating “checkerboard” sections of land along the right-of-way while retaining the intervening sections.
- Leo Sheep Company and Palm Livestock Company were successors in fee to certain odd-numbered sections in Carbon County, Wyoming, located near federally retained even-numbered lands around the Seminoe Reservoir.
- Members of the public used the reservoir area for recreation, but access from the south and east required crossing petitioners’ privately owned sections.
- After negotiations for access failed, the United States cleared and posted a road across petitioners’ land to facilitate public entry to the reservoir area.
- Petitioners sued to quiet title, asserting the United States had no property right to build or maintain the road across their land.

## Issues

1. Whether the Union Pacific Act of 1862 implicitly reserved to the United States an easement across the railroad’s granted sections to reach retained public lands.
2. Whether an implied right of access could be supplied by the common-law doctrine of easement by necessity, canons governing construction of federal land grants, or the Unlawful Inclosures of Public Lands Act of 1885.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed the Tenth Circuit and restored judgment for petitioners.
- The Court held the United States did not retain an implied easement to build a road across petitioners’ land to reach federal lands.
- The 1862 Act’s text and structure did not support reading in an unstated federal right-of-way across the granted sections.
- The common-law easement-by-necessity concept was not a suitable basis for expanding federal rights in the face of a detailed statutory land-grant scheme.
- The land-grant canon resolving doubts in favor of the Government could not be used to defeat Congress’s evident intent to confer substantial, unencumbered property rights as a subsidy.
- The Unlawful Inclosures Act did not make petitioners’ refusal to allow uncompensated passage unlawful and did not authorize a public road across private land without compensation.

## Legal Principles

- Courts will not infer reserved federal servitudes or easements from a statutory land grant absent clear textual or contextual support showing Congress intended to retain them.
- Common-law doctrines (including easement by necessity) have limited force where Congress created rights and obligations through a comprehensive statutory land-disposition scheme.
- Canons favoring the Government in construing public grants do not permit rewriting a grant to add unexpressed burdens inconsistent with legislative intent.
- The Unlawful Inclosures of Public Lands Act addresses wrongful enclosure of public lands and does not create a general federal right to cross private property to reach public lands without compensation.
- When the Government seeks access across private land, the appropriate mechanisms are voluntary acquisition or condemnation with just compensation, not implication of a retroactive easement.

## Conclusion

The Court rejected an implied reserved easement across checkerboard railroad-grant lands, holding that the United States lacked authority to build and maintain an access road over petitioners’ property to reach retained public lands and must obtain access through purchase or condemnation.


Leo Sheep Co. v. United States, 440 U.S. 668 (1979)