Already posted!
Related links on FR:
A Warning for Property Owners (Boulder, CO)
Novmeber 5, 2007
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1924861/posts
Retired judge: This land is my land (Jurist rules in favor of colleague, snatches $1 million parcel)
November 14, 2007
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1925997/posts
If you use the property in a manner that is open and notorious and continuous for the statutory period.....bingo, it’s yours. Tried one of these in East Texas once and won it. Bordered Toledo Bend Lake. Fun case.
Click on this link to see a video of the Kirlins and the land in question:
http://cbs4denver.com/local/local_story_319091443.html
Gee, they conveniently forgot to mention that the beneficiary of this whole court proceeding happens to be a newly-retired judge. Perhaps he’s a friend of the judge who made the ruling? Naaah, couldn’t be - that would be a conflict of interest.
I think it’s called stealing.
The base premise of this story is false; this case will be overturned on appeal.
They should have made a $120,000.00 fence.
The same thing can happen if you give someone permission to cross your land regularly. They use your land as the means of access to their land, then you find that you cannot rescind permission.
Regularly inspect all property holdings for unauthorized usage. Document and interrupt the unauthorized usage. Use the local police to notify the unauthorized users of the violation.
ping
It sounds as if this particular claim was bogus, but the principle behind it is, unfortunately, law.
You can establish a right of way by using a path for a certain number of years. Our children used a path across several neighboring properties, down to a dock on the water from our summer house, and the previous owners also had used it. It didn’t give us any rights to their property, but it did prevent them from fencing us off the path. All but one neighbor were agreeable to letting our kids use it anyway, the one problem being someone who bought a house long after we’d been crossing her property, maybe for thirty years. But she backed off without our having to take it to court.
Another neighbor built a septic field for a converted boat house, that extended into the woods at the bottom of our property. We never noticed it until we came to sell the house, when it suddenly became a problem, because the Title Company wouldn’t issue a guarantee until the matter was settled. The buyer and our neighbor worked out a settlement. But the basic law suggested that he “owned” the property he had mistakenly used, because we hadn’t objected to it. Or, since we hadn’t known about it, at least we would have had to take it to court if they hadn’t agreed to settle the matter to the Title Company’s satisfaction, which would have killed the sale.
This goes against every instinct of fairness, but it’s the law in Maine, where this took place, and probably in other states. I would guess it derives from English common law. I know that in England property owners cannot block public footpaths across their property.