SARA BRONIN: Hi.
I'm Sara Bronin, and I created Property Law 101
to help you learn about property law.
We deal with four fundamental questions in this series,
and today we are talking about the second, which is how do we
come to acquire property?
We are talking about adverse possession, which
is the legal doctrine that allows someone who is occupying
land owned on paper by someone else to come to own that land.
Every state lays out a specific statutory period
for the adverse possessor to be on the property
before he or she can claim rights to it,
but what happens if the adverse possessor stops
possessing the property halfway through the statutory period?
Consider this scenario.
Bob moves onto the property in year one.
He marries Steve in year five.
Tragically, he dies in year six, leaving all of his property
to Steve in the will.
Let's say in that jurisdiction the statutory period is
10 years.
So the question is, does Steve have any rights
to the property?
Courts will answer this question by considering
the question of tacking.
So the court will ask whether Steve
can tack onto the rights of Bob that Bob acquired in years one
through four.
In considering the answer, courts
will usually draw from contract principles and specifically
the principle of privity.
So privity means a connection between two parties
which is based on a mutual legal interest.
Here, a deed passed on over the years or, in this case a will,
might be enough to show privity.
Why would a court require privity?
Well, because the court doesn't just
want anyone to benefit from the work of a prior possessor.
The prior possessor and the current possessor
has to have some kind of relationship.
The same is true for true owners.
So let's say Donna owned a parcel for 12 years--
Donna adversely possessed a parcel, rather, for 12 years,
and the statutory period in that jurisdiction is 10 years.
Yet the property changed ownership three times
during that 10-year period.
The court will look to the way that the property changed
ownership during that period and they
will say that from one seller to the next,
as long as there was a contract between them
or some relationship that gave the subsequent seller rights
to the prior seller going all the way back to when Donna
started adversely possessing the property 12 years ago, that is
enough to show that Donna can force
the current true owner to tack onto the sloth
of the prior true owners.
Related to the concept of tacking,
whether it's on tacking on the work of the adverse possessor
or tacking on the sloth of prior true owners,
is the concept of relating back.
This means that once an adverse possessor acquires title
to property, the adverse possessor
is deemed to have possessed the property
from the time the adverse possessor first
entered onto the property.
So it's important to understand, with all of this in mind,
that embedded in adverse-possession law
is the principle that people can tack onto the work of others
and that there is flexibility in tacking
onto the sloth of prior true owners.
For true owners, the lesson here is really
to not sleep on their rights and to monitor property.
For adverse possessors, the lesson
is that you have to have some kind of document, relationship,
or arrangement with subsequent adverse possessors
so that they can benefit from your work.
So that's tacking.
I will leave it there.
And I hope you will engage with me on Twitter,
through my website, through my mailing list,
and I will see you next time.
Thank you.