V. Cassel Adamson, Iii v. Columbia Gas Transmission, LLC

UNPUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 13-2468
V. CASSEL ADAMSON, III,
Plaintiff - Appellant,
v.
COLUMBIA GAS TRANSMISSION, LLC,
Defendant - Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern
District of Virginia, at Richmond. Henry E. Hudson, District
Judge. (3:13-cv-00214-HEH)
Submitted: June 25, 2014 Decided: July 28, 2014
Before NIEMEYER, SHEDD, and FLOYD, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.
S. Sadiq Gill, Brittany J. Berlauk, John B. Warden, IV,
DURRETTECRUMP PLC, Richmond, Virginia, for Appellant. Travis A.
Sabalewski, REED SMITH LLP, Richmond, Virginia; Michael S.
Dingman, REED SMITH LLP, Falls Church, Virginia; Tillman J.
Breckenridge, REED SMITH LLP, Washington, D.C., for Appellee.
Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.

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PER CURIAM:
V. Cassel Adamson III appeals the district court’s
orders granting summary judgment to Columbia Gas Transmission,
LLC (“Columbia”), and entering a declaratory judgment that the
easement on Adamson’s property is sixty feet wide. On appeal,
Adamson challenges the weight that the district court gave to a
Virginia circuit court case interpreting the dimensions of the
same easement on Adamson’s neighbor’s property, and he asserts
that the district court did not properly consider his evidence,
which, when viewed under the appropriate analysis, raised a
genuine issue of material fact regarding the dimensions of the
easement.1 We affirm.
“We review de novo whether the district court erred in
granting summary judgment, viewing the facts and drawing all
reasonable inferences therefrom in the light most favorable to
[the non-moving party].” PBM Prods., LLC v. Mead Johnson & Co.,
639 F.3d 111, 119 (4th Cir. 2011). Summary judgment is properly
granted “if the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as
1 Adamson also argues that the easement, as interpreted by
the district court, was indefinitely certain and violated the
rule against perpetuities. We conclude that Adamson adequately
presented his claims regarding the easement’s certainty but did
not argue the rule against perpetuities in the district court.
Therefore, we will not consider Adamson’s rule against
perpetuities claim for the first time on appeal. See Muth v.
United States, 1 F.3d 246, 250 (4th Cir. 1993).

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to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a
matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a). The relevant inquiry is
“whether the evidence presents a sufficient disagreement to
require submission to a jury or whether it is so one-sided that
one party must prevail as a matter of law.” Anderson v. Liberty
Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242, 251-52 (1986).
Adamson first contends that the district court,
sitting in diversity, failed to give the appropriate weight to
an unpublished decision of a Virginia trial court when the
Virginia Supreme Court refused the petition for appeal,
concluding that there was no reversible error. A federal court
sitting in diversity has an obligation to apply the law of the
forum state as it is interpreted by the state’s highest court.
See Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 78 (1938); Ellis v.
La.-Pac. Corp., 699 F.3d 778, 782 (4th Cir. 2012) (holding that
law of forum state applies in diversity cases). If the highest
state court has not addressed the issue or the law is unclear,
the federal court must “forecast a decision of the state’s
highest court” in light of “canons of construction, restatements
of the law, treatises, recent pronouncements of general rules or
policies by the state’s highest court, well considered dicta,
and the state’s trial court decisions.” Wells v. Liddy, 186
F.3d 505, 528 (4th Cir. 1999); see also Private Mortg. Inv.

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Servs., Inc. v. Hotel & Club Assocs., 296 F.3d 308, 312 (4th
Cir. 2002).
We agree with Adamson that the cases were more than
similar. However, neither party claims that the district court
was bound by the principles of res judicata or collateral
estoppel, and the district court was not bound by the fact that
the Virginia Supreme Court refused appeal from the circuit
court’s decision. While a refusal of an appeal is a decision on
the merits of the case, a refusal has no precedential value
where the reason for the refusal is not apparent on the four
corners of the Virginia Supreme Court’s order. Sheets v.
Castle, 559 S.E.2d 616, 618-21 (Va. 2002). Merely because the
Virginia Supreme Court found no reversible error does not mean
that it embraced the interpretation of Virginia law that Adamson
raised in the district court. See id. at 619. Moreover, there
is ample Virginia law on the construction of easements that the
district court could and did apply. Therefore, we conclude that
the district court gave the appropriate weight to the circuit
court’s decision.
Next, Adamson challenges the district court’s
analysis, asserting that it did not give appropriate weight to
the intent of the parties. When construing the terms of an
express easement created by deed, Virginia courts “apply the

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customary rules governing the construction of written
documents”:
[Where] [a] deed . . . [e]xpressly create[s] an
easement but fail[s] to define specifically its
dimensions . . . and the deed language does not state
the object or purpose of the easement, the
determination of the easement’s scope is made by
reference to the intention of the parties to the
grant, ascertained from the circumstances pertaining
to the parties and the land at the time of the grant.
Anderson v. Delore, 683 S.E.2d 307, 310 (Va. 2009) (internal
quotation marks omitted). “However, if the granting language
states the object or purpose of the easement, the dimensions of
the easement may be inferred to be such as are reasonably
sufficient for the accomplishment of that object.” Id.
(internal quotation marks omitted); see also Hamlin v. Pandapas,
90 S.E.2d 829, 834 (Va. 1956).
Virginia does not require a strict hierarchy of proof
but instead evaluates multiple sources of evidence to supply the
dimensions of an easement when those dimensions are not
specified in the deed, including evidence of the dimensions
necessary to effectuate the easement’s purpose. The district
court considered evidence regarding Columbia’s need in
effectuating the purpose of the easement and Adamson’s other
evidence that the width of the clearing on the easement had
historically been forty feet. We conclude that the district
court did not err in granting summary judgment to Columbia where

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Columbia’s expert testified that sixty feet was required to
effectuate the purpose of the easement and Adamson offered no
rebuttal evidence, plat maps consistently depicted the easement
as being sixty feet wide going back to the time that the
original grantor conveyed the property, and Adamson had no
evidence of the size of the clearing at the time the grantors
held the property. Adamson’s other evidence did not reach the
heart of the matter and was not sufficient to raise a genuine
issue of material fact. Therefore, the district court did not
err in entering a declaratory judgment that the easement was
fixed at sixty feet in width.2
Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s orders.
We dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal
contentions are adequately presented in the materials before
this court and argument would not aid the decisional process.
AFFIRMED
2 We decline to consider Adamson’s argument that the
easement was insufficiently certain and susceptible to being
expanded at Columbia’s discretion because it is not necessary to
resolve the case. The district court’s declaratory judgment
stated that the easement was sixty feet wide, and the evidence
adduced in summary judgment proceedings was sufficient to find
this fact.

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