Hill went down to the fishing hole on a Colorado river, the one he claimed was his favorite. Until those darned landowners "chased him off the property, sometimes with force." He claimed they didn't take too kindly to his efforts to go fishing on their land: "Specifically, Hill alleges that they threatened to have him arrested for trespass, thew baseball-sized rocks at him, and shot a gun at his fishing buddy."
Hill sued, asserting that the landowners don't actually own the riverbed, and thus he had a legal right to be there. His complaint asserted two claims: (1) he sought a declaratory judgment that the riverbed is public land, owned by the State of Colorado (Equal Footing Doctrine and public trust alert!), and (2) he sought to quiet title, apparently in the State.
In State v. Hill, No. 22SC119 (June 5, 2023), the Colorado Supreme Court sent the case out with more of a whimper than a bang. It didn't deal with the Equal Footing or public trust arguments, but rejected the lawsuit because Hill lacking standing. As the court put it in the first paragraph of the opinion:
This dispute has produced hundreds of pages of briefing from the parties and amici involving extensive discussions of the public trust doctrine, the equal footing doctrine, and arguments around who is best positioned to determine legal policy on access to rivers. But those subjects are ultimately irrelevant to the issue before us. Rather, this case requires us to answer just one question: whether Roger Hill has a legally protected interest that affords him standing to pursue his claim for a declaratory judgment “that a river segment was navigable for title at statehood and belongs to the State.” He does not. Hill has no legally protected right independent of the State’s alleged ownership of the riverbed onto which he can hook his declaratory judgment claim. His asserted legally protected interests rest entirely on an antecedent question of whether the State owns the property at issue. Therefore, they cannot provide him with standing to pursue a declaratory judgment action.
Slip op. at 4.
The State didn't want to make any claim to own the riverbed, and the court concluded that Hill could not do so himself. Lacking any interest in ownership other than as a member of the public, he lacked standing to make these claims. Yes, Hill alleged injury, but he didn't meet the second part of Colorado's standing test, that he has a legally protected interest that was injured.
[Disclosure: our law firm colleagues filed an amicus brief in this case.]
State v. Hill, No. 22SC119 (Colo. June 5, 2023) (en banc)
