7 years later, Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla loses bid to privatize public beach

[RickMycroft]

@glenblank

As the court’s decision clearly says,

"It is undisputed that Martins Beach is private property. "

This is a complicated case, in part because the undivided parcel’s title dates back to the original Spanish land grant, which alters the usual “mean-high-tide” equation, which only applies to land entitled under US California state law. (And, no, children, that is not some irrelevant technicality.) But that was not a factor in the current decision.

Oh gods, this is weird-ass legacy shit, isn’t it? The current act doesn’t directly mention Spanish land grants, so unextinguished grants must be very rare, and they’ve carefully buried it with phraseology somewhere (a “space between the notes” problem), and you’d have to know exactly where to dig to find it.

coastact.pdf

I expect that they deal with these kind of legacy problems better in the UK, since they probably have so many. e,g, Some grant by the Kingdom of Wessex that accidentally wasn’t cancelled by the Lord Protector’s Parliament act of “Sod all thys ancient crappee”.