Every state in the country has an adverse possession law, although the requirements for bringing a case differ widely. For example, the length of time that a person must show uninterrupted use of another's land varies from five to 30 years.
In California, people who want to claim someone else's land must not only use it for at least five years, they also must pay property taxes on it. That's also the case in a handful of other states.
One reason for that requirement is to alert the owner that someone is using the property. "Most courts are not disposed to easily give land away," said Spencer W. Weisbroth, a San Francisco lawyer.
Because of that requirement, he said virtually all California cases fail.
The majority of cases involve minor boundary encroachments in which neighbors aren't sure where the borders of their land are, Penalver said. Most are resolved without litigation; the owner issues a warning and the encroaching neighbor withdraws. "It's a rare case that gets litigated."
It's an even rarer case that makes the news.
That happened this year in New York, when a land dispute prompted the state Legislature to pass a law preventing someone who knowingly occupies someone else's land from acquiring it. The governor later vetoed the law, saying efforts to prove the person's state of mind would lead to more litigation.
Most states don't make a distinction between people who unknowingly occupy another person's land and those who do it deliberately, Penalver said. But many people are more understanding when someone unknowingly uses someone else's land, he said.
Public reaction also depends on who's claiming the land.
In a highly publicized case in London, a homeless man this year won ownership of a small plot in a tony neighborhood where he had lived in a shack unchallenged for 21 years. He was seen as a sympathetic figure.
That wasn't the case in Colorado, where Boulder District Judge James C. Klein -- who has served since 2005 in the same judicial district where McLean served from 1981 to 1997 -- ruled the couple had demonstrated that their attachment to the land was "stronger than the true owners' attachment."
"Whereas defendants were unaware of plaintiffs' use of the disputed land during virtually their entire 22-year period of ownership, plaintiffs have efficiently used the land on a daily basis," Klein wrote in his opinion.
