BOULDER, COLO. — For more than 20 years, a retired judge and his lawyer wife trespassed on a vacant lot next door to their home.
They planted a garden there and stacked their firewood. They say they held parties there and walked the land so often they wore a path in the grass.
Last year, Richard McLean and Edith Stevens claimed the land as their own under Colorado's adverse possession law, once known as squatters' rights.
In October, a district judge awarded them one-third of the lot, which its owner values at $1 million.
Although the couple won in a court of law, they have not fared well in the court of public opinion in this university town, where the case has become a cause celebre, sparking a protest and calls for change to the law.
The doctrine of adverse possession, which says a person can gain possession of property after using it without challenge by the owner for a certain length of time, isn't a new or obscure legal doctrine. Still, its application in this case has the residents of this university town fuming.
"This scares the hell out of landowners," said Don Kirlin, the man whose property was taken away. He said he and his wife first took it as a joke when he heard of the former judge's designs on their land.
In 1984, Kirlin, a commercial airline pilot, and his wife, Susie, a former teacher, bought two adjacent lots on the southern edge of the now-pricey city. They lived in a home a short distance away, but hoped to someday build their dream house on their vacant land, which abuts city-owned open space, a rolling expanse of ponderosa pine and native grasses.
They frequently walked their dogs past their vacant land, but say they never saw any sign that anyone was using it.
Nor did they think to worry about such a thing, Susie Kirlin said. After all, they paid their property taxes and homeowner fees. They sprayed for noxious weeds and repaired fences. What else did an owner have to do?
That attitude speaks to misconceptions about property ownership, said Eduardo Penalver, a law professor at Cornell University.
"There's a mythology of land ownership -- that if you own land, you can do anything you want," he said. Property rights are limited, he said. "This is one of those limitations: If you're not vigilant, it could be taken."
The law is based on a philosophy that land should be used, Denver real estate lawyer Willis V. Carpenter said. "If you don't use it and someone else does, they'll end up owning it," he said.
