Legal Definitions - dispossession

Dispossession refers to the act of wrongfully taking away or withholding someone's rightful control or occupancy of property, especially land or real estate. It means that a person who is legally entitled to possess a property is unlawfully removed from it or prevented from using it.

Here are some examples to illustrate this concept:

• Illegal Eviction: Imagine a tenant who has a valid lease agreement for an apartment. If the landlord, frustrated by a late rent payment, changes the locks on the apartment door without obtaining a court order or following the legal eviction process, this is an act of dispossession. The landlord has unlawfully deprived the tenant of their rightful possession of the apartment, even if rent is overdue, because the tenant still has a legal right to occupy the property until a proper legal procedure for eviction is completed.

• Squatter Occupancy: Consider a family who owns a vacation home that they visit only a few times a year. While the home is vacant, an unauthorized individual moves in, changes the locks, and begins living there, refusing to leave when confronted by the owners. This constitutes dispossession because the unauthorized individual has wrongfully taken possession of the property, preventing the legal owners, who are lawfully entitled to occupy it, from using or accessing their own home.

• Boundary Encroachment: A homeowner discovers that their neighbor has built a new fence and a small storage shed that extends several feet onto their property, effectively claiming and using a strip of land that legally belongs to the homeowner. This is an example of dispossession because the neighbor has wrongfully taken control and use of a portion of the homeowner's land, thereby depriving the homeowner of their rightful possession and use of that specific area.