Lobato v. Taylor
Colorado Supreme Court
71 P.3d 938 (Colo. 2002)
After acquiring roughly a million acres in what became Colorado, Charles Beaubien recruited settler families in the 1850s and, in an 1863 grant (the Beaubien Document), guaranteed them access rights and the benefits of pasture, water, firewood, and timber on the land. When Jack Taylor (defendant) bought a portion of the Beaubien land in 1960, his own deed expressly acknowledged he took it subject to local settlers' prescriptive or other claimed rights to pasture, wood, lumber, and settlement rights - yet Taylor refused to let local landowners (plaintiffs) access the land as their ancestors had for generations. The landowners sued claiming easement rights; the trial court and court of appeals both ruled for Taylor, and the landowners appealed.
Whether a court can imply an easement by estoppel when a landowner permitted land use under circumstances where it was foreseeable the user would substantially and reasonably change position relying on the permission continuing, the user did so rely, and injustice can be avoided only by recognizing the easement.