The public's right to walk along Great Lakes shorelines, even adjacent to private lakefront property, remains unchanged, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up an Indiana case that sought further clarity on where people can stroll along the waterline.

As is customary, the Supreme Court rejected the "writ of certiorari," or the request that it hear an appeal, without comment, along with hundreds of other cases it declined nationwide.

The lawsuit in question was filed in Indiana by Donald and Bobbie Gunderson in 2014. The couple at the time owned lakefront property in Long Beach, Indiana, on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and were among area property owners protesting a community ordinance that adopted the State of Indiana's definition for land available for public use along the Great Lakes shoreline — the "ordinary high water mark" delineated by wave action and where plant life is aquatic or washed away.

The couple asked the trial court to rule that the public had no rights to "any land abutting Lake Michigan.” The state, in turn, along with intervening public advocacy groups, requested the trial court declare that Indiana holds the disputed beach in public trust for use by all. An Indiana Circuit Court, appellate court and state Supreme Court all upheld the public's right to access.

"This case presents the question of who owns thousands of miles of beaches on the Great Lakes," the Gundersons' attorneys stated in their writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Do the beaches belong to the government, or instead to the private landowners whose deeds include the beaches, and who have long looked after them and paid taxes on them?"

The Indiana Supreme Court's determination of what constitutes the ordinary high-water mark, including shoreline areas where wave action has removed upland grasses and plants, was "an apparent attempt to justify government claims to every inch of sand on the beach," the Gundersons' attorneys stated.

"In doing so, Indiana has claimed title to a huge swathe of scenic and valuable real estate that private landowners had thought was theirs."

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Michigan affirmed the right to public access to Great Lakes shorelines in a 2005 state Supreme Court ruling. That case stemmed from a 2001 lawsuit brought by Joan Glass, who owned a cottage in Greenbush in Alcona County, just across the U.S.-23 highway from Lake Huron. Glass' property deed from her purchase in 1967 included a 15-foot easement on the lakefront property across the highway from her house to gain access to the lakeshore.

But decades later, shoreline property owners Richard and Kathleen Goeckel began having frequent disputes with Glass, over both her use of the easement and her strolls along the shoreline in front of their property. The Goeckels' property deed specified one of their boundary lines as the "meander line of Lake Huron."

A county circuit court sided with Glass' right to access. The Goeckels appealed, and appealed again when the state Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's ruling.

On July 29, 2005, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the general public has the right to walk along the shore of Lake Huron on land below the natural, ordinary high-water mark, and that walking the lakeshore was a traditionally protected public right.

Joan Glass died in 2010. Her attorney in the beach access lawsuit, Pamela Burt of Harrisville, told the Free Press last month that she didn't see a need for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the Indiana case.

"It should (already) be the same law of the land in all Great Lakes states," she said. "The U.S. Supreme Court has already articulated the same rule about state sovereignty over its waters to the ordinary high-water mark, period. The federal law on this matter is so well-settled in my mind."

Contact Keith Matheny: 313-222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com. Follow on Twitter @keithmatheny.