To appreciate the holding in Dexter v. Brake, 269 P.3d 846 (Kan. Ct. App. 2012) (Dexter II), we must return to a prior holding of the court in Dexter v. Brake, 174 P.3d 924 (Kan. Ct. App. 2008) (Dexter I). Dexter I concerned one of those mundane procedural issues: whether a non-party to the litigation must be joined. In Dexter /the court was probably trying to do the parties a favor, by allowing the merits to be addressed even though neither party joined a cotenant mineral owner who was subject to the oil and gas lease but apparently did not want to participate in the litigation. The Dexter I court relied upon commentary in the Williams & Meyers, Oil and Gas Law treatise to the effect that a failure to join all cotenants merely means the lessee may continue to have a relationship with the suing cotenants, not as an oil and gas lessee, but rather as a cotenant through the unjoined lessor.
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