How in the heck did squatters right even get started????
It’s immorality on steroids.
Out on the prairie. You’ve been traveling in a covered wagon for months and months, and you come across an abandoned house, no crops, no livestock. You move in, plow and seed, harvest, fix up the ramshackle house, and years later, your kids growing up there, you think of it as home, but some ragged tramp shows up, having lost everything in the gold fields further West, and claims the land is his. You can deny his claim based on adverse possession, doctrine of laches, and unjust enrichment if he moves in and takes over all your years of work. So you are said to have squatters’ rights.