Here’s a whopper of a story from the Washington Post that flat knocked me over.

Cliff’s Notes version: Lawyer leaves the hustle and bustle of firm life to do some farming, and buys a tract of land in rural Caroline County, Virginia. He decides he’ll build a herd of world-class Angus cattle, and takes advantage of a ninteenth-century law that says if you build a fence, you can charge the adjoining land owner half the costs of putting it up. He buys the most expesnive kind of fence he can find, then sends the bills to his new neighbors, most of them elderly and retired. The most expensive bill goes to a guy named Perry Brooks, for $45,000.

Lawsuits ensue, and ultimately the Virginia Supreme Court unfathomably find the fence law constitutional.

Mr. Brooks has some cattle of his own, and one of his bulls — ironically enough — gets through the expensive fence, and taints the high-fallutin’ lawyer’s world-class herd.

Somebody ends up dead. And it’s not the bull.

Flannery O’Connor could have written this story. Except it isn’t fiction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 8:37 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.