A legal description is a way to locate properties in legal documents in the US, using a combination of lettered abbreviations and numbers based on a grid system created by the Public Land Survey System. The system divides each state into a grid system, and each property is located within a specific township and range. The legal description includes information about the size and location of the property, and it can be obtained from a county clerk’s record office or property deeds.
A legal description is the terminology used in the United States to describe the locations of properties in legal documents. This is typically based on existing city grids and uses a combination of lettered abbreviations and numbers to locate terrain. The description can usually be obtained from a county clerk’s record office or from property deeds.
In the United States, a legal description is created by the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), a division of the federal government. The PLSS, using professional surveyors, has divided each state, or local territory, into a grid system. This quantifies where the municipalities are across the state and where, within each, a specific property is located.
The PLSS was originally created to divide up land that was owned by the federal government. The system documents land from 30 states, but not those on the East Coast or Texas. Much of the property in those areas has been sold and is privately owned.
A legal description might look like this:
S ½ NW ¼ SE ¼, S32, T10S, R22W
This example states that the property described is in the southern half of the Northwest neighborhood – of the Section 32 Southeast neighborhood – in Township 10 South and Range 22 West. Properties are easier to locate on a map when the description is read from right to left. This allows the reader to start with the largest patch of land used in the description and gradually work their way up to smaller or more specific.
The range is determined by counting the number of cells, east or west, from a specified starting point. Township indicates how many cells, north or south, the property is from a specified second starting point. These points were originally created by surveyors from the US Department of the Interior and are normally outlined on state maps.
On these maps, each land cell identified by distance and township numbers is six square miles, or 36 miles total. These 36 are further divided into individual one-mile sections. These are further numbered in an S-shaped grid, alternating right to left on the first line, then left to right on the second, throughout the section.
Each section in a legal description is further divided into four quarters, each containing a 160-acre parcel of land. The parcel can be divided again, into four quarters of 40 acres each, which can be divided again, if necessary, into two halves of 20 acres or four quarters of 10 acres. This level of specificity allows surveyors to create legal descriptions for properties ranging in size from one to 100 acres.
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