The History of Squatter’s Rights: From Medieval England to Modern America
The story of owning land just by living on it
Adverse possession, AKA ‘squatter’s rights’, is defined by Cornell Law School as ‘a doctrine under which a person in possession of land owned by someone else may acquire valid title to it’.
In other words, if certain conditions are met, it is a legal way to gain ownership of someone else’s home and land just by living on it yourself. As peculiar as it sounds, this is a practice still enshrined in law by many places in the western world.
To understand this strange and uncommon practice, we must first look at where it arguably originated: medieval England.
The makings of a law
Like much of western law, we find the first recognizable form of squatter’s rights in England.
Today, there are various statutes of limitations across different jurisdictions that prescribe the amount of time someone must have been occupying a space to gain ownership to it. A fairly typical amount of time is seven years. This means that, assuming all other boxes are ticked, if a person has been living uninterruptedly on someone else’s property, they gain legal ownership of it after this period of time.
