Its not a long dispute about land with Judge Danforth
The semicolon is used in the text above, to cause an intermediate effect between the comma and the period. In this case, when he used a semicolon the author was indicating to the reader that it was necessary to pause, in reading, longer than the pause of a comma, but less long than the pause of a point. This is done because the sentence displays a partially complete thought, but it will present more arguments to be finalized.
In a more simplified way, we can say that the use of a semicolon in the text above was made to separate long coordinated sentences with the same syntactic function.
