Oh, California. Oh, Federalism.

This laboratory of Democracy stuff tires me sometimes.
Just when I was settled into a comfortable level of familiarity with preemption laws, agricultural lands acts, common law principles of adverse possession, I start looking at specific legal cases and discover that none of those apply. Instead I find local exceptions like the California Possessory Act of 1852.
See, when the US of A "bought" California from Mexico as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo we promised to honor the system of land grants and the rights of former Mexican citizens to their property. This wouldn't have been a problem if things had gone as expected and settlers from the east had trickled into the territory at the usual rate. Problem was, there was a gold rush within a year of the transfer and the new residents didn't care much for the property rights of anyone.
Later in this project I will be working on sections describing the 1850-2 Sacramento Squatter War. For now I will just say that the newly-minted state government was persuaded to pass legislation that reads a lot like a draft of the federal homesteading act passed ten years later. The key principle of the act is simple; it gives precedence of claim to the person physically in possession of land. Like the federal Homestead Act of 1862 the design was to discourage speculators and to boost settlement.This from a decision in 1871:

By the time we get to Mrs. Hamilton and the culmination of her six years of legal wrangles with the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad in 1912, the act had been repealed but the principle remained as a legal avenue to challenge the leasehold of the LA&SL over Terminal Island.Her lawyers argued before the State Supreme Court that her occupation and use of the land in question was a prior claim in keeping with the precedents and legal environment of California. The court honored the logic of that argument, but refused her claim because her occupation did not meet the agricultural standards of the act. In other words, because she was renting out houses and not farming or ranching she failed to meet the same conditions of the 1852 law as the LA&SL.
Reading the decision it quickly becomes obvious why the court agreed to hear the case. They bundled all of Mrs Hamilton's legal troubles into a single hearing and disposed of her preemption claim in a single paragraph of a nine page decision. What they really wanted to settle was the constitutional issue of possession and leasing of tidal lands. Hamilton's attorneys argued that the land was federal property and therefore open to preemption, but the court decided that the state constitution (Article V, section 3) gave the state, and therefore the municipalities of the state, ownership and leasing rights.
Boring, huh? I promise to work on the presentation.
Granted, California is a special case but I expect a lot more of this going forward.