A judiciary oversight committee has rejected a Boulder couple’s request to investigate a neighboring couple who used an arcane legal loophole to take over their property.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s Attorney Regulation Counsel rejected Don and Susie Kirlin’s request to investigate ex-judge and former Boulder mayor Richard McLean and his lawyer wife, Edith Stevens, who won a strip of their property on Hardscrabble Drive.

McLean and Stevens won a third of a vacant lot that the Kirlins owned for more than 20 years.

The legal doctrine of “adverse possession” lets someone who uses another’s property for 18 years without an owner’s objection take control of the land under certain circumstances.

McLean and Stevens argued that they had used a strip of the 4,700-square-foot lot to reach the garden and deck of their home virtually every day for 25 years.

Boulder District Judge James C. Klein found that McLean and Stevens met requirements needed to win the land.

Don Kirlin said Tuesday he doesn’t expect to appeal Klein’s decision.

“I just want this thing to be over. It is not even the money, I just don’t want to spend the next two or three years of my life fighting to get back land that I own.”