There isn't an elegant way in vanilla Java prior to Java 21.

Google Guava

The Google Guava library is great - check out their Iterables.getLast() method. This method will throw a NoSuchElementException if the list is empty, as opposed to an IndexOutOfBoundsException, as with the typical size()-1 approach - I find a NoSuchElementException much nicer, or the ability to specify a default:

lastElement = Iterables.getLast(iterableList);

You can also provide a default value if the list is empty, instead of an exception:

lastElement = Iterables.getLast(iterableList, null);

or, if you're using Options:

lastElementRaw = Iterables.getLast(iterableList, null);
lastElement = (lastElementRaw == null) ? Option.none() : Option.some(lastElementRaw);

a last() method is just as easy as list.get(list.size()-1), just like there is no first() method or fifth() method. It isn't that hard to synthesize and is a specialization. You can also reverse() the list and list.get(0) which will give the last item. Things that are easy to do, usually don't get their own specialized methods.

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class Main
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        final List<String> l = new ArrayList<String>();

        l.add("A");
        l.add("B");
        l.add("Z");

        System.out.println("l.get(0) = " + l.get(0));
        System.out.println("l.get(l.size()-1) = " + l.get(l.size() - 1));
    }
}

results in the following output

l.get(0) = A
l.get(l.size()-1) = Z

it is also presumptuous to assume that everything that implements the List interface actually has the concept of last() anything.