Last night at dinner my gracious host asked me a legal question. She'd heard on the news about a man who had been living in the canyons near our neighborhood for eighteen years and had just been kicked out. After eighteen years, she asked, isn't there something that protects him from that sort of thing? And I actually knew the answer. I said generally there's a rule that if he lived there long enough and treated the land as his own it became his, but that the doctrine doesn't apply to government-owned land, and since I assume the canyons are some kind of park or preserve then no. For the first time, instead of hemming and hawing about research and overlapping jurisdictions, I actually had the answer to a layperson's legal question! I had not only learned something, but I could remember it later! I had this law shit figured out.
But it took me an hour to remember the words "adverse possession."
1 comment:
I am so with you. Last year my uncle sent me this long landlord-tenant question and I had no idea. I had to tell my family I didn't know any law, so stop asking me.
Then last month my aunt asked me if my grandma could put such and such provision in her will...and I knew! She could! It was pretty damn exciting.
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