Neighbors, fences and easements
What is the difference between adverse possession and a prescriptive easement?
Based on an interview with Josué Cristóbal Guerrero, Founding Partner, recorded .
The short answer
Adverse possession gets you ownership. A prescriptive easement gets you a specific right to use someone else's land. The elements are the same, hostile, open, notorious and continuous for five years, with one difference: adverse possession also requires paying the property taxes.
Permission can never ripen into hostility.
What an easement is
An easement is an interest in land short of owning it: a specific bundle of rights to use someone else's property in a specific way, and easements vary as much as human creativity allows: passing along a trail, ingress and egress, utilities, boating, fishing. Our founding partner has litigated everything from ordinary access and utility easements to view, airspace and cell tower easements.
Why permission changes everything
Both claims need use without the true owner's permission. This is the counterintuitive part: permission does not wear off. Use under permission does not become adverse possession or a prescriptive easement just because time passes.
Rights also come in layers. Suppose a neighbor lets you drive across their land, and while fixing the driveway you lay a sewer line without asking. Five years later you may hold a prescriptive easement for the pipe and still have no easement to drive there, in the same ten or fifteen feet of land.
Which one applies to you
To make an easement by prescription a matter of record, you need a judgment in a quiet title lawsuit. Which theory fits, and how far it reaches, is highly fact specific.
- Code of Civil Procedure section 325. The adverse possession statute, including the tax requirement.
This answer is general information about California law and is not legal advice for any specific situation. Deadlines and exceptions turn on your facts. Code sections were checked against California Legislative Information on November 4, 2026.
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