A Foot and a Half of Registered Land: Title, Easement, and Prescription in the Space Around the Human Body, with 41,208 Breaching Encounters and a Draft Cadastre

Stand a little closer to the person beside you. They will move, and neither of you will have decided anything. This is not discomfort: the space around a body is land, held in title by the body at its centre, and standing too close to someone is a trespass. We surveyed that land. Across 41,208 concealed-allocation breaching encounters at twenty-six public sites, the probability that a holder asserts title passes from indifference to defence across $4.1\mathrm{cm}$ of approach (95% CI $3.8$–$4.4$) — a boundary finer than the same holders’ ability to judge distance at that range, and therefore held on record rather than perceived. Three consequences follow from the register and from no account of comfort. Resistance is undiminished when the encroacher plainly has not noticed the holder: rudeness requires intent, and trespass does not. Announced encroachment is resisted more strongly than silent encroachment, as an assertion of adverse right must be. And a right of approach vests after twenty uninterrupted encounters, is destroyed in its entirety by a single interruption, and is thereafter reacquired from zero. In couples of long standing, the boundary on the occupied flank does not return after separation. You are not uncomfortable. You are being dispossessed.