Talk:Adverse possession

Shouldn't there be a discussion of the progression?

It would be nice to include a discussion of AP from Roman law. Additionally, it seems inappropriate to discuss AP without explaining that it can be used as a defense to a claim of trespass, or an eviction. Finally there should be applications for AP as it applies to tenants and landlords as well as a discussion of AP of chattels. I'm not willing to take this on, but this article seems far from even scratching the surface.

Adverse possession, usucaption, hævd ...

Enwiki has this article on [[Adverse possession]] as well as Usucaption and Usucapio. The separation seems to be that this article is about the concept in common law, whereas usucaption deals with the civil law and usucapio is about the principle in Roman law.

I see two problems with the current split/contents:

- The article about usucaption does not really describe the concept in civil law, but only the historical use in Roman law and Rabbinic Judaism. This could of course be fixed by describing how the concept has evolved, and how it is in use today.

- More importantly, for the layman, this is really ONE concept, which has evolved in parallel in those two legal traditions. This concept is called "adverse possession" in English. Usucaption is only used when explicitly referring to the concept in civil law. Each article should be about one concept. We don't have two articles for the concept of "Murder". The fact that they would have the same name is not really a good reason - we could have Murder (civil law) and Murder (common law).

My problem with this arose, when trying to determine the correct interlanguage link for da:Hævd - the similar concept in Danish/Nordic laws, currently linked to usucaption. Since this article is explicitly about the common law, linking this and "Hævd" would be confusing.

My modest proposal: Eliminate the "in common law" from the lead, and add that this is called usucaption in civil law. Change interlanguage links from other languages with similar concepts to point here. Either gut Usucaption completely, or make it a "For more detail" article. For this to make sense, it would need to actually have more info than it does currently.

I expect someone with more knowledge and probabl stronger feelings to tell me why my proposal is wrong. NisJørgensen (talk) 11:03, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

I could make your prediction come true by making up a bunch of reasons your proposal is wrong, but really it's a great idea.

We often have law-related pages that are U.S. or U.K. based, for obvious linguistic reasons, and when they are "globalized" they get as far as the commonwealth and former possessions and then lose steam. A truly comparative view would be fantastic.

Usucaption seems to be an obscure term that doesn't link up to English language concepts. Instead, I think we should focus on "acquisition by prescription" or "prescriptive acquisition". Here are my reasone:

• the term prescription has ties to common law property law concepts (prescriptive period, easement by prescription, etc.)
• the Louisiana section (its laws are rooted in the French Code Civil), talks about acquisitive prescription but that links to Prescription_(sovereignty_transfer) which is not the same concept.
• the French Code Civil Art. 2258 talks about " la prescription acquisitive"

We could easily:

• change the lede to say something like "adverse posession in common law, and its related civil law concept acquisition by prescription..."
• add information about the French Civil Code and a summary of Danish Law, etc.
• when the content is complete, make Usucaption either (a) a redirect that leads to this page or (b) a redirect to Usucapio which would then have a hatnote saying something like "this relates to the roman law term, for the modern law concept see "Adverse Possession". I prefer (b).
• create redirects for the terms acquisition by prescription

Happy to hear any other/further views. Oblivy (talk) 11:57, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks - this is really helpful. I am wondering if we should still mention "usucaption" in the lead, since I find quite a few sources mentioning it as the civil law equivalent of adverse possession (sometimes with acq.pre. as a synonym).

On another note: I just realized that "prescriptive acqusition" is apparently a common mistranslation of the French term - which is properly translated as "acquisitive prescription". Google gives 3.400 hits for the former, 41.900 for the latter. I guess the order does not matter much - it is just a question of whether you focus on the mechanism (prescription) or the result (acquisition).

I don't know if/when I will have time to do this - but at least now the idea is docuement NisJørgensen (talk) 11:19, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

I take your point about the terminology. This Google Ngram report is interesting:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=usucaption%2Cprescriptive+acquisition%2Cacqisition+by+prescription%2Cacquisitive+prescription&year_start=1970&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false
The reason I used prescriptive acquisition is that it's the term used in Louisiana and was already in the article. If anybody knows French and French law in the U.S. it's the Louisianians, who borrowed a lot from the 1804 Napoleonic civil code.

I don't love it, but I don't think it's a mistranslation.They both get to the same place, but one focuses on the result and the other focuses on the method. At some point I'll get around to adding at least Usucaption to the lead, and probably one or more of the others. Oblivy (talk) 13:40, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

"Good-faith" and "bad-faith" squatting

This article uses these terms throughout, primarily in the table of countries, but doesn't distinguish between what makes squatting good-/bad-faith. Surely that is a subject question? The squatter will always argue that it was good faith if they're given the option, and the imposed person will argue the squatter was a malicious actor. Is this a defined legal term or is good/bad faith determined if/when the squatter's case goes to court? Not even sure where to look for sources for this. — Rtrb (talk) 20:56, 5 November 2025 (UTC)