Adverse possession is a way for people to enact their own “land grab” and could possibly happen to your land if you aren’t careful. In a case in Wisconsin, neighbors claimed conserved land belonged to them because they had built a pool and a greenhouse over the property line. The court disagreed.
American property law originally came over from England and brought some baggage with it. Under old English law, if you improved land and claimed it as your own for long enough, it would truly belong to you. This helped resolve ownership issues when land was left vacant by plague or war.
Today, adverse possession is still a guiding principle in property law in cases where landowners don’t actively protect their property rights for extended periods of time. In the Wisconsin case, the neighbors built improvements on the land trust’s land for many years, unaware they had crossed the property line. They eventually sold the property and the new owner sued for adverse possession, arguing that previous owners had used the land long enough to qualify as rightful owners.
The court ruled in favor of the true landowner and the land trust, finding that the old owners had not acted with the hostility necessary to establish adverse possession. The court found that most of the claimed property remained in a wild state and the actions of the old owners in periodically removing invasive species and planting ornamental grasses were more of a “benign trespass.”
The court avoided the question of whether adverse possession could extinguish a conservation easement, saying the land trust was simply asking out of an “abundance-of-caution” in a case where nobody had argued the land shouldn’t be conserved. The question of how compatible medieval English law is with modern American conservation law remains unanswered.