This proceeding was for #10 penalty for hunting on land of the plaintiff. The plaintiff proved that the defendant had gone with a gun and killed geese at a blind in Currituck county, on a shoal at the head of the channel, which led to Currituck inlet, which is now closed. The blind was about one mile from the marshes on the banks. The plaintiff, to show title, read two grants, one for 496 acres, the other for 346 acres, dated in 1839.
Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know
Decided 1846-12-05
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently December 1995
2 federal appellate · 2 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
¶1
His Honor-probably founded his opinion, that the grants-to the plaintiff were void, upon the Acts of 1715,
Rev. Cade,
c. 6, s. 3, and of 1777, c 114, s. 10, which directed how land lying on a navigable water, should be entered and surveyed, not adverting to the circumstance, that those provisions were not in force in 1839, when the grants were issued. Whether the
locus in quo
would have been the subject of entry or not, under those Acts, it is not material to enquire: for the Revised Statute of 1836,
Rev. Slat.
ch. 42, omits the actions under consideration, and, so, left the matter at common law. Now, at common law, this land could clearly be granted by the sovereign: for this case does not state any regular flood and ebb of the tide in Currituck sound, since the closing of the inlet. The omission in the Act of 1836, has been supplied by an Act at the late session of the Assembly, which re-enacts those parts of the Acts of 1715, and 1777; but while they were dormant, and
*141
the common law alone in force, the grants to the plaintiff were valid.
¶2
The judgment must, therefore, be reversed, and a
venire de novo
awarded.
