Along the coastline of the United States, such legal rights have served as ammunition in an increasingly acrimonious war pitting the public against owners of extremely valuable beachfront property. Without performing thorough due diligence, those considering buying coastal real estate or property that abuts public land may unwittingly find themselves locked in expensive legal battles. Victory for landowners is hardly guaranteed. “You don’t want to pay $20 million for a beach house and find out you have to allow the public to walk through your yard,” says Elizabeth J. Giffin, a land use attorney in Los Angeles.

Nowhere has this struggle been more contentious than along the 27 miles of coastline that make up Malibu, Calif., the famous beach city northwest of Los Angeles. The most high-profile case involves David Geffen, legendary music producer and partner in DreamWorks SKG studios, who has been in a protracted legal fracas to prevent the establishment of an easement across his Malibu estate down to the sands of Carbon Beach.

A few miles away, on Broad Beach, the Trancas Property Owners Association has, in the past, employed security guards on ATVs to chase off sunbathers and surfers who turn into trespassers by going beyond the mean high-tide line—the mark where public property ends and private beaches begin in California. Last summer, the battle for beach access grew so heated that the California Coastal Commission, the state agency charged with maintaining the Golden State’s beaches, ordered homeowners to disband their security force and take down some of the many no-trespassing signs. The agency even published an online aerial map that showed each homeowner’s plot, noting any lateral easements that allow the public to use the beach above the mean high-tide line. The property owners association has sued, and its case is currently pending.

Steve Hoye, director of Access for All, a group that seeks to guarantee public access to Malibu’s beaches, says that the creation of harassment-free public access for Broad Beach and Carbon Beach is inevitable. “We will open up Carbon Beach,” Hoye says, adding that another Carbon Beach homeowner, about a half-mile from Geffen’s property, has given his permission for a future public easement. “It’s only a matter of time.”

TOP VIEW Public easements across our property can compromise our privacy and lower land values. Because laws that govern easements are not easily challenged, our best defense is to perform thorough due diligence to identify public rights of way before we buy. Otherwise, prickly and prolonged negotiations may be our only option.

Hoye wants a public easement across Geffen’s property and may already have it in hand. Hoye’s group holds 20 offers of dedication, which are made by waterfront property owners to the California Coastal Commission to allow public easements on their properties in exchange for building permits to expand homes. Among them is a 1984 offer of dedication for a public easement on Geffen’s property, which Access for All acquired in 2002, two years before it was set to expire. “We are trying to balance the fears and worries of the property owner with the public’s right to access,” Hoye says. “We have a very sensible and sensitive plan for a public easement on Mr. Geffen’s property. We want to show people that public easements won’t necessarily lower their property values.”

Clearly, what is sensible and sensitive to some is an invasion of privacy and a costly imposition to others. Steven Amerikaner, a real estate attorney at Hatch & Parent in Santa Barbara, Calif., argues that public easements do, in fact, lower property values. “It is very difficult to challenge existing public easements,” he says, advising that the best way to deal with them is to avoid them altogether. “Cases involving easements really are buyer-beware stories.”