Rye v. Baumann

George Rose Smith, J., dissenting. I would affirm the decree on the ground that the description of the excepted one acre is void. This description can be followed by á surveyor only if an acre is taken to be a measure of distance. “Acre ’ ’ is defined by Webster’s New International Dictionary (2d Ed.) as the area of a parcel forty rods long by four rods broad, and by Bouvier’s Law Dictionary as a quantity of land containing 160 square rods, “in whatever shape.” The term is essentially a measure of area; I do not think it has a sufficiently fixed and definite meaning as a measure of distance to warrant its use in that sense in the legal description of real property.

The majority’s statement that three fourths of an acre is 156.5 feet is apparently based on the fact that a square acre, containing 43,560 square feet, would have sides approximately 208.7103 feet long. (The length is necessarily an approximation, as it is mathematically impossible to find the exact square root of 43,560.) Apart from the fact that the majority have introduced an element of uncertainty into the law of real property, where certainty is the most important requirement in the law, I have never heard the word acre used as a measure of distance and am not convinced that it has an established meaning in that sense. Who ever heard of a man walking-ten acres before breakfast? One might as well declare that a gallon is 6.14 inches, because that would be the approximate length of the side of a cubic gallon. In my opinion the . grantors in the deeds before us failed to describe the excepted acre with the certainty that the law wisely requires in matters of this kind.