FormulaNova said..
Surely a court cannot make you sell your property to someone...
A court (in the Westminster style democracy form of government) can only interpret and uphold the law.
So if the law permits it somehow, then there may be circumstances in which a court can order it to happen.
Freehold title in Australia is reasonable robust compared to elsewhere, but not absolute. For example it gives perpetual ownership of the land, but it does not necessarily infer everything associated with the land is also owned by the title holder.
Compulsory acquisition laws do exist in Australia and so, in some circumstances, you can be ordered by a court to sell your freehold title rights.
In a case of a neighbourly dispute over boundary alignment however, the court could determine where the boundary lies, but I doubt a court could determine sale of land from one to another. I suspect circumstances may exist where a court may determine compensation be paid from one party to another, but that would likely be for past beneficial use or damage rather than transfer of freehold ownership.
I know a person who owned a house, garden and the paddock behind it. They moved the garden fence to expand the garden by about 10m and landscaped and planted out the extended garden. It was very nice, in the Gertrude Jekyll style apparently. Anyways, a neighbour who overlooked the paddock and had a side view of the now extended garden complained. It did not block their view of anything, other than a very small part of their view appearing to be more 'urban' than 'rural'. But it turned out in this council area you did indeed need planning permission to convert the rural land to garden. So the home owner did a bit of investigating on what else they needed permission to do on their freehold title - and it turned out they didn't need permission to build a wall around the paddock from scrap cars.
So they did. And then the neighbour's only view was a 5m high wall of half crushed scrap cars, No paddock, no landscaped garden, no idyllic rural outlook across majestic green pasture, hardly even a glimpse of the blue sky, just a solid wall of rusting scrap cars. I recall a Ford Cortina with no roof was the centerpiece, sandwiched between a puke-green Nissan and another Ford.
Sometimes it is better to put up with what you have than wish for something else.
