09/15/2026
In Louisiana, a fence your grandfather put in the wrong place can end up being the actual legal property line, and the survey that says otherwise can go in a drawer. ⚜️
This is one of the places where our civil law does something the rest of the country finds a little unnerving.
Start with the ordinary rule. The boundary is where the titles say it is, and if the neighbors disagree, either one can bring a boundary action, a surveyor goes out, and the line gets fixed according to the deeds.
Now the Louisiana part. The Civil Code recognizes that a visible boundary, a fence, a hedge, a ditch, a row of posts, can itself become the boundary through possession alone. If a landowner has possessed up to that fence in good faith and under a title he believed was good, ten years will do it. If he possessed it without good faith or without a title, thirty years will do it. At that point the fence is the line, and the paper becomes history.
The requirements are real. The possession has to be continuous, public, peaceable and unmistakably up to that visible marker. Mowing the grass on your neighbor's side out of kindness is not possession. Fencing it, working it and treating it as your own for three decades is a different matter entirely.
The reason this exists is practical rather than romantic. Land in this state has been surveyed under French arpents, Spanish grants and American sections, and enormous amounts of Louisiana ground were fenced generations before anybody paid for an accurate plat. If the courts unwound every fence line that did not match a deed, half the rural parishes would be in litigation for a century.
So the law made its peace with the ground the way people actually used it.
Before anybody moves a fence their family did not put there, it is worth finding out how long it has been standing. Down here, time is a form of title. 🌙