Hunting preserves are increasingly common throughout the west and are mainly where these disputes arise. Some of the largest landholders in the west, for example Ted Turner, are mostly in the business of buying cattle ranches and converting them to hunting preserves.
I don't think this case is very constructed at all, as many similar disputes have played out in my region, but generally they don't make it to court... they end up either as hunters getting run off and not returning, or the BLM district supervisor sending nasty letters to get gates unlocked, or an argument mediated by the sheriff where everyone leaves unhappy. What's unusual about this case is that it has a very clear and well-documented set of facts that makes it an almost ideal test case for the issue of corner crossing, and both public land advocates (which range from the owner of OnX who is involved in this case to many other political lobbying organizations) and landowners looking to retain the ability to restrict access to their adjacent public land stand to benefit. The well-documented set of facts here are not that surprising as this is a well-known issue in hunting circles and there are quite a few people who document their means of land access very carefully in order to defend themselves in a situation such as this.
You still need someone with balls to be plaintiff and someone with money to fund the suit. It reeks of a constructed case, it's not the usual case of a hunter getting run off by private security or someone given the runaround by the sheriff, who knows whose side he is supposed to be on.
Maybe because it is, I bet they more than once were miffed about the whole idea if the infinitely small point of contact between two checkerboard plots preventing them to pass from one parcel of public land to another, which is technically at zero distance from the first.
I suppose they wanted to make a case to demonstrate the dubiousness of that norm, and successfully have made one. Kudos to them.
I don't think this case is very constructed at all, as many similar disputes have played out in my region, but generally they don't make it to court... they end up either as hunters getting run off and not returning, or the BLM district supervisor sending nasty letters to get gates unlocked, or an argument mediated by the sheriff where everyone leaves unhappy. What's unusual about this case is that it has a very clear and well-documented set of facts that makes it an almost ideal test case for the issue of corner crossing, and both public land advocates (which range from the owner of OnX who is involved in this case to many other political lobbying organizations) and landowners looking to retain the ability to restrict access to their adjacent public land stand to benefit. The well-documented set of facts here are not that surprising as this is a well-known issue in hunting circles and there are quite a few people who document their means of land access very carefully in order to defend themselves in a situation such as this.