Keep in mind that adverse possession is also what allows you to keep owning your house when someone finally gets around to digitizing some ancient plan for a never built neighborhood that shows a proposed street running right through where your living room is now.
I don't think this article really does a great job of explaining the concept, and it's not "mind-bending" at all. Sure you end up empathizing with the defendant, but they leave the plaintiff's narrative hanging there like he was still somehow massively wronged. The whole point is that this was land the defendant had considered hers and had been openly using for decades, while the defendant's grandfather didn't even exercise the basic effort to notice and object.
The best time to complain about your neighbor's goat pen being over the line is as soon they've built it. The second best time is within the next decade.
indigodaddy · 2h ago
Personally I think it’s insane. It’s one thing to be encroaching and build a fence a little bit over your line or whatever, and it would be reasonable for a judge to say you get to keep your fence or even extend her property a little into his. It’s another thing entirely to award the entire piece of land. These sorts of laws are outlandish, insane, and should be dressed back.
mindslight · 2h ago
It seems like you think this is some standalone law rather than an integral part of the system that is able to create the concept of "owning" a piece of land to begin with. The fundamental problem here is that both of these real estate owners did not care about "the line" enough to ascertain where it actually was, until a court finally had to do it decades later. The straightforward way to avoid that is to head off any such ambiguity ahead of time.
Also in the context two-thirds of an acre doesn't seem like that much - it was seemingly only one eighth of what the plaintiff was looking to sell. The NPR long-form interview format is lacking in that it pushes out a bunch of pertinent details, but I'm guessing that was either goat grazing area outside the pen and/or the plaintiff/grandfather had already subdivided it into building lots and the judge saw using those lines as a straightforward way of settling the matter for a pro se defendant?
I don't think this article really does a great job of explaining the concept, and it's not "mind-bending" at all. Sure you end up empathizing with the defendant, but they leave the plaintiff's narrative hanging there like he was still somehow massively wronged. The whole point is that this was land the defendant had considered hers and had been openly using for decades, while the defendant's grandfather didn't even exercise the basic effort to notice and object.
The best time to complain about your neighbor's goat pen being over the line is as soon they've built it. The second best time is within the next decade.
Also in the context two-thirds of an acre doesn't seem like that much - it was seemingly only one eighth of what the plaintiff was looking to sell. The NPR long-form interview format is lacking in that it pushes out a bunch of pertinent details, but I'm guessing that was either goat grazing area outside the pen and/or the plaintiff/grandfather had already subdivided it into building lots and the judge saw using those lines as a straightforward way of settling the matter for a pro se defendant?