[motohagiography]

The kicker in the article that "nobody is going to grant access out of the goodness of their heart," is absolutely untrue. There are fox hunts and hikes in my area where landowners grant access for this reason. What has done the most harm is insurance and the risk of liability and litigation from people injuring themselves on your land, and that has made landowners become very aggressive about trespassers, as it just takes one "slippin' jimmy" scammer (like the many auto insurance collision scammers already out there) to put their home at risk and cost them a significant settlement. That liability makes any trespassing at all a present and reckless threat against your home.

Public land is lovely until you have vagrancy problems as well. I live around conservation land near a major suburb and the number of loiterers, trespassers, and poachers you get is way more than you expect. When you are close to the city, the relative isolation becomes a real home invasion risk. Privacy and respect for property and boundaries is a very regional value, and attitudes against something as obvious as littering just aren't universal either. The corner crossing case in the article where there is some tendentiously legal loophole is really an example of people lacking respect for property and going where they explicitly aren't welcome. Nobody has a problem with people coming to appreciate nearby public land, but use and abuse of it without any value or contribution to the surrounding community is a problem. Instagram has become an utter cancer that way, where people drive into your driveway to take a picture, and then you get 10 others showing up because they want the same location. Someone who demonstrates that lack of respect for privacy and property should be incentivized to do so with whatever imposed cost is adequate, imo.

[pas]

Wait. How is anyone liable if someone slips & trips while trespassing?

Being held liable for setting booby traps for thieves, sure, completely understandable. But ... injury while walking ... especially on land that wasn't prepared as a path/road? WTF

Is this some kind of black comedy bingo contest?

> attitudes against something as obvious as littering just aren't universal either. > Instagram has become an utter cancer that way

Yeah, no questions about those. Some people are just unimaginably selfish and inconsiderate egokings/queens.

[balderdash]

In some states even if the person is trespassing you can be liable for contributory negligence.

https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/who-is-liable-if-a-trespas...

[pas]

ah, too bad that article only has basically one example, and everything else accessible via a few Google searches is complete trash on the subject :(

it seems the standard seems to be somewhere around "ordinary care" and reasonably expecting trespassers

so - to my layman eyes - it seems simple, that if someone slips while crossing my field/forest and it's in its natural state, then I contributed nothing :)

built environment is different (and usually well demarcated), and the problem is probably with backyards and front lawns and other gardens, where people leave out stuff, let's say a saw.

[theptip]

For example, “attractive nuisance”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine

I don’t know about liability for injury to adults trespassing but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a thing in some jurisdictions.

I’d be fine with explicitly limiting liability in exchange for passing “right to roam” laws, the US is way to litigious.

[Zak]

This is an area of the law I find problematic. It seems to me there should be a way to tolerate access without assuming any liability.

[pas]

adhesion contracts? basically a sign that says "by entering you accept all liability"

[Zak]

I don't think that would work because attractive nuisance is meant to be about risks to children, who are generally presumed to be unable to waive liability. Originally, it was only applied to very young children, but has been expanded. In one case, 17 year old boys were allowed to use it: https://www.law.com/almID/900005548604/

Very young unsupervised children probably aren't an issue for a property in a remote area, but 17 year olds on ATVs could easily access such a property and could certainly find ways to injure themselves with the combination of ATVs and terrain.

I think statutory limits on liability for attractive nuisance would probably be the best answer. It should not be usable over a certain age - ten seems about right to me. That's old enough to know things like drowning is possible, unfamiliar machinery is dangerous, and large animals can hurt you.