It would be interesting to know if this, or any similar law or legal principle, is still in effect anywhere, even nominally. The ancient Adverse Possession means of snatching land is still in effect in many jurisdictions (but notoriously not Torrens-title jurisdictions), but actually going about grabbing land via Adverse Possession is rather difficult and time consuming.
I would guess that if there is such a principle still in effect somewhere, there’s going to be a case sooner or later where someone swoops in and dumps a prefab cabin somewhere and then immediately goes to court to get the land records updated. There’ll be much hemming and hawing and they will probably get away with it too… but the legislature will be working through the night to get it closed right away.
We have Torrens-title and Adverse Possession here (vic.aus). They are orthoganal concepts: the title tells you who last owned the land. Adverse possession is a way of acquiring ownership.
FWIW, I think we don’t allow adverse possession of government land. So you can’t establish adverse possession of parks, roads, or random bits of back-country.
Unlikely. The provision was put in the Homestead Act to prevent people from just claiming land and then doing nothing with it. In Centenial, James Michener has a family doing this with just a doll house in Colorado earlier in the 19th century. Apparently they added the minimum size (12x12 ft) to try to plug the loophole.
That family also had each member, including young kids, making claims. They moved the doll house from one claim to another before swearing they’d built a house. That way, they could get several times the land of a single claim. I don’t know if they tried to plug that loophole. Perhaps they put in a minimum age or something.
Hardly the most reliable cite, but the Little House on the Prairie books claim the restrictions at that time included an age limit of 21 (though it also mentions someone getting one underage), a rule that someone has to live in the claim house for 6 months of the year, as well as keeping ten acres of the land ploughed and ‘fit for planting’.
While on tour in Turkey a couple of years ago, we saw areas of “less than standard” housing. Our guide told us that they were overnight houses that had been constructed in the same manner described above, but they were not rebuilt…perhaps added to, or some reconstruction, but not rebuilt.
The Turkish government has a program to get rid of these structures. They promise the current owners a brand new nice apartment in one of the many high rise buildings that we saw springing up in profusion.
What other odd or interesting “shortcut” policies are there that have been seriously alleged to exist (even if they never actually existed in a de jure sense or have since been abolished)?
I seem to recall reading about one religious tradition that had a rule something like that if you cheated your way to ordination, then that ordination was valid anyway because God obviously was OK with it - otherwise God would have stricken you down and/or warned the leadership not to ordain you… God apparently didn’t, so he’s cool.
For example, are there any schools where you can sneak into classrooms and take exams and/or turn in papers and end up with real credits or degrees? That could be a holdover from days gone by when recordkeeping or coordination was not as good and faculty would informally invite promising scholars to just show up to class rather than deal with a half-functioning bureaucracy ("…and we’ll handle the paperwork later. For now, just learn the material.").