If an adverse party to a lawsuit had to act in response to a document, and if the document was sent to that party by mail, as of the year 1872, California Code of Civil Procedure section 1013 used to allow the adverse party an additional one day for every 25 miles distance between the place of deposit in the mail and the place of address, not to exceed 90 days in all.
How did the parties and courts get good measurements of distance to accurately apply the statute in that day and age? If I received a notice by mail, I would have to go somewhere or ask a surveyor to figure out my response date? How accurate were the measurements in remote areas? I wonder how often parties disputed the close calls.
PS: The current statute allows 5 additional days for any address in California and 10 days within the US but outside California, etc.
The California Geological Surveywas established in 1860. And it looks like there was a lot of surveying underwayabout the time of your 1872 code, so I’d wager they simply used the new maps coming out at the time to judge the distance. A ‘day per 25 miles’ standard probably left enough margin of error to minimise disputes.
As for accuracy - the old surveyers were pretty remarkable really. When the Ordnance Survey completed their triangulation of the British Islesthey found:
(The baseline was 27,404 feet long).
Perhaps the most impressive feat of nineteenth century surveying was the calculation of Mount Everest’s height as part of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India. Using a series of measurements taken from five different locations more than 100 miles away they calculated a height of 29,002 ft (8,840 m) in 1856. The modern figure is 8,848 m (29,029 ft), so the nineteenth century surveyers with their theodolites and chains were out by less than 1 part in a thousand.
I’d imagine the US surveyers were probably about as accurate as their British counterparts.
So every time an attorney goes up against a new party in a different location, the attorney would have to access the maps? They must have been kept in each county courthouse?
Geometry (literally, from the Greek for “Earth measure”) has some ancient history.
Plato and Archimedes made estimates (or guesses?) of the Earth’s size, but they were badly wrong. Later, 3rd century BC, Eratosthenes did much better – He did this by comparing the sun’s shadows in Alexandria and Syene, and he came up with a suprisingly accurate result.
Although, to be sure, in order to do the computations, he had to first accurately know the distance from Alexandria to Syene. So it kind of begs the OP’s original question.
Once you have accurately measured one fixed baseline (that’s where the chains come in) you can derive all the other distances through trigonometry.
And BearFlag80’s 1870s lawyer could probably get by with two maps - here’s Asher & Adam’s1874 map of Northern California and Nevada at a scale of 1 inch to 20 miles. Not sure how much it would cost then but it’s yours for $120 now from that site…
You’re overthinking this. It’s not like they needed to compute the distance down to the hour. Chances are the statute was never invoked, but let’s suppose that a judge was asked to rule whether a respondent had answered the complaint within the required time. It’s well within the judge’s discretion to round up in the interest of equity, and very unlikely that the judge would reject an answer because it arrived one day late.
Everest continues to rise as the Indian subcontinent pushes north against Asia. I wonder how much of that 27-foot discrepancy is due to the elevation actually changing?
Another example of almost the same thing is Message Board software which imposes a delay. If the message reads “The board requires that you wait 120 seconds between searches”, then the actual required delay should be, perhaps, 110 seconds.
I probably do about ten SDMB searches per week, but about half fail with the error message, some of them asking me to come back in 2 seconds. :smack:
This would be my guess. The lawyer would eyeball a map, orguess from a rough distance to nearest big town, and ask for a court date far enough in advance that the other side could not appeal on the grounds they were not given enough time.
Most towns had mile markers with a distance to another location. They dated before the Revolution in the US and one of the things Benjamin Franklin did as Postmaster General is to make sure they were on main roads.
They may not have been 100% accurate, but they were close enough to give a mileage in that sort of situation.
I understand that the discrepancy would actually be 29 feet, as the results of the original calculations came to 29,000 even, and they added two feet so it wouldn’t look like an estimate.
So one party can just eyeball a map as a defense to a late pleading while the other party can request judicial notice of a precise measurement if one is available. Sounds like a hell of a way to apply a statute.
The moral of the story is don’t cut it close. Ask for a court date wih plenty of time when serving papers. Respond within plenty of time when a defendant. If you cut it too close, expect the other side to go all lawyer on you if it helps win their case.
Yes I work with lawyers, I am one. I was responding to the post about the suggestion that the lawyer just eyeball a map to calculate a response date. The one who eyeballed it could get it wrong, send a late response, and be challenged by the adversary who actually did a mileage calculation and requested judicial notice of the distance. The judge would have to decide whether to honor the late document. The judge would have to decide whether eyeballing it was close enough or if the rule should be strictly applied. Otherwise, I don’t understand the comment that I don’t work with lawyers. Of course the lawyer will err on the side of caution and sometimes will miscalculate and run up against an adversary wanting to exploit the error.