Roger Williams and his buddies would (and did) vehemently disagree with this doctrine.

I think you need to remember that Lock and Smith were writing in a century when "they're not using it (by our definition), so we can just go take it" was the legal underpinning by which the english colonies mostly justified forcing the natives off their land and that sort of interpretive creativity had been used for hundreds of years by the various parties in England seeking to get one over on each other.

Now, there's a lot to be said for "default" public access to/through un-posted, unimproved land and there's an even stronger argument in favor of landowners (public included) being required to have some legal access to land they own but the american system where the land owner has fairly unlimited right to kick other people off his property (of course the .gov excepts themselves) arises out of the disputes that the historical english doctrine (there's a word for it but escapes me) causes.

I think people buying up land strategically to block access to other land is obviously bad and the whole corner crossing thing should have been a joke, but this is a very thorny and complex problem.

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mothballed 4 days ago | parent [-]

I believe what you're referencing in the second paragraph more closely describes adverse possession, than the initial creation of the property right from mixing land with labor.

	▲	potato3732842 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		We call it adverse possession now but they had some different old timey term for it (the name escapes me) and the laws that they inherited from the english were far, far, more favorable to the possessor than what we have now because it was all built around the reality that the peasants who would be the ones working the land might have some rights but never really owned shit at the end of the day and that if some peasant who had the right to use some spot wasn't using it then the next guy was free to use it productively because at the end of the day the lord/church/crown/village whatever would extract their cut regardless, more productivity, more cut for whoever. Papering over "but you said I could graze my animals there" vs "yeah but you weren't using it" type disputes makes sense in that context. What happened in parts of New England was people were expanding into native territory, the natives would show up appeal to these people's governments "hey, one of your assholes built a farm where I hunt, tell that guy to GTFO" and sometimes they'd win but usually the .gov would say basically "you weren't using it in any way we recognize, piss off", basically using the historical doctrine they got from England (which you can't really fault them for in the absence of other doctrine, though clearly their strategic vision was lacking), until eventually, farm by farm and pasture by pasture so much had been taken that the natives were so squeezed a lot of them cast their lot in with King Phillip. And after that the various lawmaking bodies started saying things like "hey maybe that weird Roger guy was onto something with his whole 'they're using it their own way, we oughta pay em for it' schtick" and writing protections for dis-used property into law and restricting what we now call adverse possession so as to reduce/prevent such disputes from reaching a boiling point going forward. And TBH I think legally things would have gone that way anyway. The sort of adverse possession laws that make sense in a country of mostly landless peasants who have rights and permissions but don't actually have final say because they don't own the land are going to be very different than the sort of adverse possession laws in an agrarian society where most people own the land they work (i.e. the US 1700-1870ish).