Howard Hawks\u2019 \u201cRed River\u201d isn\u2019t just any Western. It was the last movie playing in the small-town Texas theater in the Peter Bogdanovich\/Sybil Shepherd film (from the Larry McMurtry novel) \u201cThe Last Picture Show.\u201d It was Montgomery Clift\u2019s first – and many say John Wayne\u2019s best – film.<\/p>\n
And how does novelist Borden Chase\u2019s quintessential American tale of the first great post-Civil-War cattle drive begin? Wayne\u2019s Tom Dunson and Clift\u2019s Matt Garth start one of the great Texas cattle herds with one bull and one cow and all the land between the Red River and the Rio Grande – land which they simply grab.<\/p>\n
Two Mexican pistolleros show up, early in the film, to tell the man and boy they can camp on the land while they pass through, but they can\u2019t stay, because the land belongs to a wealthy Mexican who lives far to the south.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s too much land for one man,\u201d Wayne declares.<\/p>\n
One of the men says it\u2019s his job to deal with such attitudes. Wayne cements his claim by killing him.<\/p>\n
The Wayne character justifies this act by asserting that the Mexican Don Diego just stole the land from whoever was there first – \u201cIndians, I\u2019m guessing.\u201d<\/p>\n
But things have changed since 1851. You can\u2019t grab a nice-looking piece of land in America today just because the owner has left it vacant.<\/p>\n
Or can you?<\/p>\n
In 1984, Don Kirlin, a commercial airline pilot, and his wife Susie, a former teacher, bought two adjacent lots on the southern edge of the now-pricey city of Boulder, Colo. They live in a home a short distance away, but hoped to build their dream house on the vacant land, which abuts city-owned open space, a rolling expanse of ponderosa pine and native grasses.<\/p>\n
They frequently walked their dogs past their vacant land. They report they never saw any sign anyone was using it.<\/p>\n
Nor did they think to worry about such a thing, Susie Kirlin says. After all, they paid their property taxes and homeowner fees. They sprayed for noxious weeds and repaired fences. What else does an owner have to do?<\/p>\n
Unbeknownst to the Kirlins, however, for more than 20 years a retired judge named Richard McLean and his lawyer wife, Edith Stevens – occupants of the house next door to the vacant lots – systematically trespassed on the Kirlins\u2019 land.<\/p>\n
McLean and Stevens planted a garden and stacked their firewood there, the Los Angeles Times reports. They held parties there and walked the land so often they wore a path in the grass.
\nIn 2006, Richard McLean and Edith Stevens went to court, claiming the land they had never bought \u00d1 land which any check of the municipal clerk\u2019s records would show as the property of the Kirlins \u00d1 was actually theirs under Colorado\u2019s adverse possession law, once known as \u201csquatters\u2019 rights.\u201d<\/p>\n
In October, Boulder District Judge James C. Klein – who has served since 2005 in the same judicial district where McLean served from 1981 to 1997 – ruled the couple had demonstrated that their attachment to the land was \u201cstronger than the true owners\u2019 attachment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Judge Klein awarded former Judge McLean one-third of the lot, which the Kirlins\u2019 value at $1 million. Though in fact the court should now pay the Kirlins the value of their entire lot, now rendered too small to build a house on, under local zoning codes.<\/p>\n
The wealthy squatters may have won in a court of law, but they have not fared so well in the court of public opinion, even in the famously left-leaning university town of Boulder.<\/p>\n
Internet bloggers ridiculed McLean and Stevens as land-grabbers who used their knowledge of the law to steal from an unsuspecting neighbor. In November, more than 200 people flocked to the property, where they hoisted signs with slogans such as \u201cThou shall not steal\u201d while shouting \u201cshame\u201d and \u201cthief\u201d at the McLean-Stevens home, according to the Rocky Mountain News.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the law allows this kind of taking, then it needs to be changed,\u201d declares State Sen. Ron Tupa, a Democrat from Boulder.<\/p>\n
The doctrine of adverse possession isn\u2019t new or obscure. But it\u2019s usually applied to rights-of-way. If your parents and grandparents allowed the neighbors to access their property or walk to a popular bathing beach across your property, you may have forfeited your right to fence off that path.<\/p>\n
But to grab a chunk of land away from a taxpaying neighbor by the simple expedient of a woodpile and some tomato plants?<\/p>\n
\u201cThis scares the hell out of landowners,\u201d says Don Kirlin, who now owns one-and-two-thirds vacant lots.<\/p>\n
In fact, that attitude betrays a common misconceptions about property ownership, Eduardo Penalver, a law professor at Cornell University, tells The Times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a mythology of land ownership – that if you own land, you can do anything you want,\u201d the professor patiently explains. In fact, property rights are limited, he argues. \u201cThis is one of those limitations: If you\u2019re not vigilant, it could be taken.\u201d<\/p>\n
The law is based on a philosophy that land should be used, agrees Denver real estate lawyer Willis V. Carpenter. \u201cIf you don\u2019t use it and someone else does, they\u2019ll end up owning it.\u201d<\/p>\n
So we can now claim someone else\u2019s land just because we \u201clike\u201d it more? And the court won\u2019t even ask why we didn\u2019t approach the owner with an offer to buy?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no longer a right to buy land, pay taxes on it, and hold it in hopes of seeing it increase in value?<\/p>\n
How about our savings accounts? That wealth\u2019s not \u201ccurrently being used,\u201d after all. Could the courts hand our savings to someone who develops \u201ca stronger attachment\u201d to them than our own?<\/p>\n
The Kirlins vow to appeal.<\/p>\n
The courts should consider carefully. For if this ruling stands, property owners are in effect being advised that the courts won\u2019t enforce their titles, leaving them only one solution: A couple guys with big hats, jangling spurs, and Walker Colts, smiling and explaining, \u201cYou are welcome to camp on this land for a day or two as you\u2019re passing through. But you cannot stay here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ah, the roar of .44s in the twilight. If the courts won\u2019t protect our property rights, they leave us to resort to older ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Howard Hawks\u2019 \u201cRed River\u201d isn\u2019t just any Western. It was the last movie playing in the small-town Texas theater in the Peter Bogdanovich\/Sybil Shepherd film (from the Larry McMurtry novel) \u201cThe Last Picture Show.\u201d It was Montgomery Clift\u2019s first – and many say John Wayne\u2019s best – film. And how does novelist Borden Chase\u2019s quintessential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private-property"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}