this is the way the world operates these days;

 

Suppose that you, gentle reader, are taken from your home at gunpoint. Not for an afternoon. You are held for thirty-two months. Eventually you are ransomed, released, and you make your way back.

You find your house occupied. Other people live in it now. You explain, politely, that it is yours. They decline to leave.

Their reasoning is not stupid, and it deserves a serious answer. They have been there fourteen months. They have painted the walls, planted a garden, buried their dead in the yard. They invoke John Locke: a man acquires title by mixing his labor with the land, and they have mixed a great deal of labor with it. Where, they ask, were you?

You reply that Locke’s argument governs only unowned things. It applies to virgin territory, or to property genuinely abandoned by its owner. Your house was neither. It was not abandoned; it was taken. You did not leave, you were removed. And through every month of your captivity you told anyone who would listen exactly where you belonged.

They are unmoved. They cite the courts, and here they have a point. In J A Pye (Oxford) Ltd v Graham, the House of Lords held that farmers who had grazed a developer’s land without permission for twelve years had thereby extinguished the owner’s title to some twenty-five hectares. Adverse possession is real law. They are not leaving. You are homeless.

Are you entitled to force your way back into your own home, despite their insistence that you have no right to be there? Yes. And where the law says otherwise, the law is unjust..........more.........