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Allocatur Watch

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case in which the heirs to a Centre County property were stripped of their oil and gas rights because of an “arcane” and outdated tax assessment law.

The court granted allocatur Jan. 27 in Herder Spring Hunting Club v. Keller.

The Superior Court decided the case in May 2014, stripping the defendants of their oil and gas rights on the property in question because the former owners, who reserved their subsurface rights when they sold the land in 1899, did not inform the county commissioners of the horizontal severance, as the law then in effect required. The Superior Court acknowledged that its decision was “at odds with modern legal concepts” and possibly viewed as “unduly harsh.”