My familiarity comes from Nevada and California. You can always ask someone
on your property to leave, and if they refuse you can charge them with
trespassing. At that point they're aware they're not permitted there. And the
penalties aren't just fines, it usually means time in jail even without any
additional factors. But without the warning, you can't charge them without the
property being posted and in most cases you can't get them more than a fine and
a warning unless it's fenced. I think one factor here is that these are states
with a lot of public land adjacent to private land so it's not at all clear
legally that people can reasonably presume any given bit of land is private.
That contrasts with Pennsylvania (where I grew up) where almost all land is
private, publicly-accessible land is the exception not the rule, and even
minimal posting means anyone on your property is facing hefty fines and possible
jail time.
This also ties into the "fence-out" vs. "fence-in" rules you
run into when dealing with cattle. States where grazing on public land's common
tend to be fence-out, where it's not tend to be fence-in. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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