Every statutory section-line highway shall be sixty-six feet wide and shall be taken equally from each side of the section line, unless changed as provided in this title, but nothing herein contained shall prevent the highway authority charged with the construction, reconstruction, or repair of any public highway along a section line from purchasing or condemning right-of-way for widening the highway to more than sixty-six feet or from purchasing or condemning more right-of-way on one side of the section line than on the other, provided they deem it necessary so to do in order to provide a better highway, to avoid destruction of trees or valuable buildings or to avoid unsuitable terrain.
S.D. Codified Laws § 31-18-2
Width of highways--Side from which taken
Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case Millard v. City of Sioux Falls (1999)
Most recently applied in Chicoine v. Davis (October 2017)
Source: PolC 1877, ch 29, § 3; CL 1887, § 1191; RPolC 1903, § 1596; RC 1919, § 8521; SDC 1939, § 28.0105; SL 1953, ch 132.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.