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Comment by chkaloon | Hacker News Reader

Huh, I think I'll draw myself up a deed for the unregistered cricket field next to St. John's College in Cambridge. Nice area, you know.

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Presumably the owner with the actual deed will object.

He'll have to prove that ownership, and I know a pretty good lawyer :)

I really, really doubt you know as good a lawyer as the actual owners of that land do. That's sort of the point of the article; the unregistered parcels are owned by the elite.

That wasn't what I got from it at all. Most of the patches I recognise were churches or Government buildings, roads etc. These aren't registered simply because they haven't had to be before. These aren't the 'elite', they're just big, old institutions. But yeah, while you could have some 'fun' trying to claim ownership of St John's College, trying to commit fraud in such a way is not advisable.

> Most of the patches I recognise were churches or Government buildings, roads etc. [...] These aren't the 'elite'

"Elite" qualifies the owners, not the property. The Church of England and the crown are most certainly elite entities.

Also the land registry are pretty good about looking at the facts and making a reasonable decision (though you do have to pay them to come out and look at the situation)

A family member of mine did this when the neighbours were being somewhat contentious as the official map data showed a part of her garden to be their land but the land registry people simply remarked the boundary officially on the historical wall.

But watch out, neighbour disutes about land ownership are well known for being awful and they can run for years, draining the savings of both parties and lowering the value of both properties and causing significant hard feeling.

Genius. At which point it becomes public knowledge.

Land as an attack surface.

I’m pretty sure the courts and police frown on forging documents to commit theft, even if the person you were attempting to steal from eventually prevails in court.

True - you'd have to be pretty keen..

Good luck taking on a Cambridge college in the courts...

Would a judge that had attended Cambridge, be deemed to be neutral enough to preside over a case involving it? That might throw a wrench in the works.

There are plenty of judges who didn't attend Cambridge - if nothing else, there are plenty who attended Oxford.

So if you timed it to coincide with the boat race....?

That's not your problem. Your problem is that some of the older colleges have vast holdings of property and they are very, very good at exploiting them. They know every trick in the book, not least because several chapters of the book are case studies of tricks pulled by the colleges in the past. Solicitors dealing with conveyancing around Cambridge hear that a college has land anywhere near the site and tremble with fear.

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