Is Adverse Possession Just Stealing Land? A Lawyer Said Yes.

Kingston, Jamaica, 11 August 2022. When the then president of the Jamaican Bar Association said publicly in 2022 that adverse possession is, in plain terms, stealing land, he was not speaking in his official capacity. He was careful to make that distinction. But the intervention mattered precisely because of who was saying it and what it named. A senior lawyer, the head of the country’s bar association, using the word stealing in connection with a legal doctrine that has operated in Jamaica for over a century was a statement designed to shift the conversation from legal process to moral reality. That shift is worth taking seriously in 2026, when the policy debate around adverse possession has become the most active it has been in a generation.

The argument runs as follows. A person who occupies land they have not purchased and have not inherited, who pays nothing for the privilege of that occupation, and who hopes that the legal owner will be absent or inattentive long enough for the twelve-year clock to run out, is engaged in an activity that the law of adverse possession does not merely tolerate but ultimately rewards with a registered certificate of title. The moral category of that activity, whatever the legal category, is closer to theft than to any other familiar concept. The law, in this reading, is not resolving a dispute about competing legitimate claims. It is validating a taking.

The counter-argument is also serious and deserves equal space. Jamaica’s land history is not a simple story of rightful owners and opportunistic squatters. It is a story shaped by slavery, by colonial land policy that concentrated ownership in the hands of a small number of planters and institutions, by a post-emancipation period in which the formally freed were systematically excluded from land access, and by a century of urbanisation and economic migration that left many Jamaican families holding or occupying land through informal arrangements that reflected social reality more accurately than any formal legal framework. When a family has lived on land for three generations, has maintained it, paid local taxes, and sent children to school from it, the language of theft sits uncomfortably. Their occupation may have begun without permission. Their relationship to that land is not so easily characterised.

What the Bar Association’s December 2022 conference session on land piracy added to this conversation was historical grounding. The session drew the connection between post-emancipation settlement practices and the current state of land occupation in Jamaica, arguing that the roots of squatting are not primarily moral failure but structural exclusion: a colonial land policy that gave the formerly enslaved freedom without land access, and a legal framework inherited from that period that has never been fundamentally redesigned for the country Jamaica has since become. Understanding that history does not excuse current squatting any more than understanding poverty excuses theft. But it does complicate the moral arithmetic considerably, and it suggests that reform of Jamaica’s adverse possession framework needs to engage with that history rather than simply tightening the screws on occupiers.

The most useful reframe the bar president’s intervention offered was not the word stealing itself, though that was what generated the attention. It was the observation that adverse possession as currently constituted does not fit a defining aspect of Jamaican culture: the pattern of migration, hard work abroad, land purchase at home, and intended return. A law designed for a society where landowners are physically present fails the large proportion of Jamaican landowners who are not. That observation, made in plain language by a lawyer at the most senior level of the profession, is harder to dismiss than the same point made in academic or policy language, and it goes directly to the heart of why reform has built cross-party political support for the first time in years.

Jamaica does not yet have a reformed adverse possession framework. What it has, for the first time in a long time, is a public conversation about whether the current one is fit for purpose, conducted at a level of frankness that legal reform discussions in this country rarely achieve. That conversation is worth tracking closely, because the direction it takes will shape the security of land ownership for every Jamaican, at home and abroad, for the next generation.