When Georgia legislators moved to redraw the border with Tennessee last week, they launched a doomed and costly waste of taxpayer money, say professionals and researchers in the arcane field of state boundaries and surveying.

The long-held legal principle is simple, said border expert Louis DeVorsey: The decisive fact is not where surveyors meant to draw the line -- it's where people have accepted the line to be over time.

"It's where people adjusted their lives to," he said.

A retired University of Georgia geography professor, Mr. DeVorsey wrote the book on another Georgia border dispute -- a court battle between Georgia and South Carolina over the exact line dividing their two states.

Georgia lawmakers have called for a new land survey to put the Tennessee border where the Peach State lawmakers say it ought to be -- on the 35th parallel, about a mile north of where it is.

The state line was drawn in 1818 by a joint Georgia-Tennessee survey team led by UGA surveyor and mathematician James Camak. Traveling in rough territory, they missed the right spot by a mile, according to modern measurements.

Courts have held over and over again that the line everyone follows over time -- not the theoretical one -- is the legal border, Mr. DeVorsey said.

"The whole thing is stupid," said Farris Cadle of Savannah, another author and researcher of boundary history.

The move to annex a slice of Tennessee will just replay what's happened before, he said.

"Every 20 or 30 years, some bright legislator that doesn't know the background of this situation ... will say, 'Oh, we're missing out on some of our territory,' " he said.

That lawmaker convinces fellow legislators to appoint a boundary commission and hire lawyers; the lawyers look up court rulings that say the boundary can't be redrawn to suit Georgia and then the border war dies -- until the next time, Mr. Cadle said.

Like others, Mr. Cadle said he believes Georgia legislators are motivated by a thirst to tap into the water that flows in the Tennessee River, just south of the 35th parallel.

"It's bad enough they're throwing away taxpayer money. It's going to create bad relations with the people of Tennessee," he said.