Washington Supreme Court adopts relative hardship doctrine and refuses to order a house removed when it was unwittingly built on land owned by another

Defendants unknowingly built their house on land that belonged to the plaintiff who also did not know that the land belonged to him. The mistake was discovered after the house was built and plaintiff sued to eject the trespassers from his land. The Washington Supreme Court denied injunctive relief, adopting the relative hardship doctrine. The court granted plaintiff damages for the value of the land encroached on by his neighbor’s structure but denied plaintiff an injunction ordering the structure removed. Proctor v. Huntington, 238 P.3d 1117 (Wash. 2010).