Colombian legal institutions, both public and private, have played a big role on land concentration and dispossession during relatively peaceful times and also in contexts of armed conflict (Gutiérrez, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; LeGrand, 1984, 2016). Assignment rules of property rights in Colombia are highly exclusive (Gutiérrez y Vargas, 2016; Peña et al., 2017), some of their constituents stimulate dispossessions and block access to rural property. These traits or characteristics have never been studied; the present article is moving towards the direction of reviewing some traits of the legal rules, which create legal barriers. The emphasis is on institutional designs of procedural laws, meaning the costs and requirements a person have to fulfill in order to become the owner of a wasteland, emphasizing on legal institutional design will help to understand the logics of land dispossession. Our final goal is to identify legal barriers only manageable for citizens capable of doing lobby and to assuming the costs and time necessary to became the owner of a piece of land. The hypothesis will be confronted with the analysis of the legal rules for adjudication of wastelands and a specific case.
