7 ms·

This article describes the process in significantly more detail: http://www.staradvertiser.com/2017/01/18/business/facebooks-zuckerberg-sues-to-force-land-sales

This article describes the process in significantly more detail: http://www.staradvertiser.com/2017/01/18/business/facebooks-zuckerberg-sues-to-force-land-sales/?HSA=74dae150a1d9f99e2592d0eac31ea430d01f35d5 http://www.staradvertiser.com/2017/01/18/business/facebooks-... The wikipedia article on quiet title is also clarifying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_title So is this article on quiet title: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-can-claim-property-based-adverse-possession-hawaii.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-can-claim-propert... If I understand it right, the issue here is situations like the following. You've got a parcel of land which was 1/2 owned by brother A and 1/2 owned by brother B (due to, e.g., inheritance). Brother A occupied the parcel for 20+ years and eventually sold it to someone else. At this point, according to Hawaii's adverse posession law, brother A owns it but owes compensation to brother B. Now many years later, brother A or his descendents sold to Zuckerberg (or some similar chain of title), and brother B's descendents may not even know they had some right to the land. There's a theoretical possibility that some descendent of brother B may show up and claim the land. These quiet title lawsuits are a way for Zuckerberg to pre-emptively settle all such issues. It's also apparently a very common and accepted way to handle such issues in Hawaii. This is basically just a horrible legal hack around the fact that Hawaii (like many places) has a totally broken title registration system. Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased. If someone knows more about this, or if my understanding is incorrect, please correct me. I know little beyond what I learned via google.

flippyhead 10y ago
I once heard someone describe law as simply software for people. I love how you describe these maneuvers as hacks.
- inopinatus 10y ago
  That is a common misconception, especially amongst engineers. There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c. In reality the law is not a programming language, and trying to treat it as such is a common cause of disappointment, frustration, anger, needless bickering, extended conflict, and vexatiously long and mostly unenforceable contracts.
  - leesalminen 10y ago
    I agree. I used to look at contracts as a series of logical statements with conditionals, inheritance, etc. After going through an extremely nasty contract dispute I learned that contracts have limited value and that I should never trust anyone, even if 4 lawyers reviewed the terms.
  - burrows 10y ago
    > There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c. There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a program and think this means they grasp its semantics; but without understanding the language specification, compiler bugs, undefined behavior implementation, posix specification, operating system bugs and configuration of deployment environment.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      I don't see why you're getting downvoted here, because the analogy is pretty apt. Much like programming languages, law language has evolved to be written in a way that's unambiguous as possible. Like programming languages, contracts and the like don't succeed in having 100% predictable semantics. One source of unpredictability of results comes from the lack of a stable, 100% predictable execution platform (namely, judges, juries, lawyers, and current case law and legislation), much like compilers and platforms do not 100% specify their behavior, or even when they do, the run-time behavior is not perfectly predictable (e.g. when does the GC run). Another source of unpredictability is that law at the end of the day must interface with the non-legal world ('facts' vs. law) and so touches global context which isn't known when the law or contract was drafted, which one might compare to dealing with unforeseen interactions with the OS, deployment environments, user input, etc. So while laws and programs try to accurately and precisely encode their own internal semantics, they sometimes fail because they depend on other things that don't have perfectly defined semantics.
  - ergothus 10y ago
    Agreed. One of the most startling discoveries I had about contracts was the concept of "consideration", i.e. that both parties of a contract should be getting something of roughly equal value. Without consideration, the contract becomes unenforceable. Prior to learning that, I viewed contracts as a set of rules, and if you didn't like the rules you agreed to, well, you lost at the contract game. Consideration turned out to be the first of a lot of contract concepts I didn't know of (and doubtless there are many concepts I still don't know about). My ex went to law school, and I found the attitude of "non-lawyers have no business having opinions about the law" that her law school promoted to be vile. That said, I've found that it's a good idea to assume that any legal issue is NOT straightforward. Doing otherwise usually ends up making me look ignorant, and has me spreading false conclusions to other non-lawyers around me.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I would describe the law as "spaghetti code" with a lot of side effects and undefined behavior :-)
- samfisher83 10y ago
  I would describe it more like Sabre (Airline booking system). Where there are so many different rules you end up some crazy pricing rules cause there are just like a million different rules evolved over time, and no really knows why it happens.
devoply 10y ago
> Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased. If they are owned by rich people, maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe it's a way to spread their wealth to the lesser fortunate. Heh.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The legal process here also spreads wealth around, just in a more liquid form. Rather than owning 1/16 of some parcel of land completely enclosed by Zuckerberg's compound, the lesser fortunate will get cash instead.
  - devoply 10y ago
    But if they actually had the parcel they could negotiate with the billionaire himself which would lead to a better pay-off. Which would be the main problem that this system circumvents. The secondary problem is those pesky natives coming on your land. There is that Silicon Valley billionaire dealing with that in California if I remember, Kholsa, in his case it's so they can access the public beach.
    - koolba 10y ago
      Looks like Zuck is getting in front of those problems by preemptively building a wall around the property: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/29/technology/mark-zuckerberg-wall/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/29/technology/mark-zuckerberg-w...
      - local_kauai 10y ago
        The wall is built and the locals are pissed
- wmil 10y ago
  It's a bad thing. It prevents people from investing in developing the land. Areas without a clear title tend to be poor because as soon as someone tries to build a factory, workshop, business, or even just a nice house they're hit with multiple lawsuits.
wmeredith 10y ago
This is my understanding of the situation as well. If this action wasn't taken the land could potentially never see use. I think Zuck is a scumbag, but this is as much a broken legal system's fault as his.
- jhowell 10y ago
  I think that possibly the amount of land he's claiming for personal use could be a problem as well. But this too is an option available to him under the law.
- shabda 10y ago
  Land owned in the commons, by community, or with a large group of people is hardly a new concept. It seems a broken legal concept because it has become uncommon now, but it was a very common way to hold land just a few centuries ago: Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure This whole situation also reminds me a bit of the Vogons destroying earth: "There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams."
  - harryh 10y ago
    This is not common land though. If it was it could just be owned by the government (like national parks) and that would work fine. This is private land owned by a large number of people (many of who might not even realize it).
slim 10y ago
> Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased. Such a need for strict definition of ownership (beyond any natural meaning) is the actual colonialism as felt by the indigenous
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- test6554 10y ago
  If clear ownership existed beforehand, then the conflict would never have occurred. Now that clear ownership will be established, all future conflict can be avoided or quickly solved. Ownership, regardless of who owns it provides a path to resolution.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    In societies that value social cohesion: the conflict can be avoided in a manner that is not 'zero-sum' in the manner property rights are. Without passing judgement on pros or cons; if someone from a foreign land xomes to you and insists that you adopt their ways of dealing with ownership and abandon your own, that is colonialism. Rephrasing GP with emphasis: > Such a need for strict definition of ownership (beyond any natural meaning) is the actual colonialism as felt by the indigenous
  - mindslight 10y ago
    You're missing the point that the framework of exclusive ownership is not universally applicable. Try applying your reasoning to eg administration of the atmosphere. The same type of colonization is happening to our information environment via the imposition of "imaginary property".
    - pc86 10y ago
      > Try applying your reasoning to eg administration of the atmosphere. You mean in terms of airspace? Because that's a thing but it ends at space, which nobody owns. It's a system that works pretty well.
rayiner 10y ago
I don't see where adverse possession figures into it. The basic problem is actually very common in agrarian populations and not unique to Hawaii. Dad owns plot of land. Brother A gets half, Brother B gets half. Brother A's two kids get 1/4 each, as do Brother B's two kids. A lot of the kids leave the land, but retain an ownership interest, and eventually you end up with two acres that have dozens of owners. It's a huge problem on indian reservations, for example: https://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/interior-standing-rock-sioux-tribe-sign-agreement-to-reduce-land-ownership-fractionation-in-indian-country https://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/interior-standing-roc.... A quiet title action and partition by sale is not a "legal hack." A quiet title action is a structured process for unifying title while compensating people with ownership interests. And because a single clear title in a property is much more valuable than a bunch of possessory interests in the same property (even put together), partition by sale maximizes the value of the land. So each person's share of the auction proceeds will be more than the market value of their original possessory interests. None of this is indicative of anything being "broken." It's basically unavoidable so long as fractional interests in land and subdivision of interests on inheritance are permitted.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I thought that adverse possession is what allows brother A to sell without the permission of brother B's distant grandchild. But as I said, I know only what I've learned via today's jetlag + modafinil fueled googling session.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    When dad dies and brother A and brother B each get half the land, they end up as joint tenants. Even if brother B then moves away and brother A uses the whole property for himself, adverse possession won't apply, unless brother A gives brother B "unequivocal" notice of his intention to claim sole ownership of the property. (Adverse possession between joint tenants requires a much more aggressive show of sole ownership than adverse possession generally.) But brother A can still sell his interest in the land. Whoever buys it steps into brother A's shoes--they're joint tenants with brother B (or his descendants). That's basically what Zuckerberg did. And as a joint tenant, he can seek a partition, which basically tells the court "hey, I don't want to share possession of this land, auction it and cash out everyone's interest."
tejohnso 10y ago
This is a legitimate and reasonable process that occurs frequently in mainland US as well. Especially if you purchase land at auction. Part of the process involves publishing efforts to ensure that all potentially affected parties are made aware of the action. Creditors are hesitant to deal with any questionable land until title has been quieted by this process so they know the purchaser has full ownership and there can be no further disputes. The quiet title process is a request for all those with interest in the land to speak up and resolve the situation. This prevents, for example, handing out a construction mortgage for someone to build a home on the land and then realizing three years later that your collateral is in jeopardy because several entities have decided to dispute the mortgagee's right to that land after the home was built.

flippyhead 10y ago

I once heard someone describe law as simply software for people. I love how you describe these maneuvers as hacks.

inopinatus 10y ago
That is a common misconception, especially amongst engineers. There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c. In reality the law is not a programming language, and trying to treat it as such is a common cause of disappointment, frustration, anger, needless bickering, extended conflict, and vexatiously long and mostly unenforceable contracts.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  I agree. I used to look at contracts as a series of logical statements with conditionals, inheritance, etc. After going through an extremely nasty contract dispute I learned that contracts have limited value and that I should never trust anyone, even if 4 lawyers reviewed the terms.
- burrows 10y ago
  > There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c. There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a program and think this means they grasp its semantics; but without understanding the language specification, compiler bugs, undefined behavior implementation, posix specification, operating system bugs and configuration of deployment environment.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    I don't see why you're getting downvoted here, because the analogy is pretty apt. Much like programming languages, law language has evolved to be written in a way that's unambiguous as possible. Like programming languages, contracts and the like don't succeed in having 100% predictable semantics. One source of unpredictability of results comes from the lack of a stable, 100% predictable execution platform (namely, judges, juries, lawyers, and current case law and legislation), much like compilers and platforms do not 100% specify their behavior, or even when they do, the run-time behavior is not perfectly predictable (e.g. when does the GC run). Another source of unpredictability is that law at the end of the day must interface with the non-legal world ('facts' vs. law) and so touches global context which isn't known when the law or contract was drafted, which one might compare to dealing with unforeseen interactions with the OS, deployment environments, user input, etc. So while laws and programs try to accurately and precisely encode their own internal semantics, they sometimes fail because they depend on other things that don't have perfectly defined semantics.
- ergothus 10y ago
  Agreed. One of the most startling discoveries I had about contracts was the concept of "consideration", i.e. that both parties of a contract should be getting something of roughly equal value. Without consideration, the contract becomes unenforceable. Prior to learning that, I viewed contracts as a set of rules, and if you didn't like the rules you agreed to, well, you lost at the contract game. Consideration turned out to be the first of a lot of contract concepts I didn't know of (and doubtless there are many concepts I still don't know about). My ex went to law school, and I found the attitude of "non-lawyers have no business having opinions about the law" that her law school promoted to be vile. That said, I've found that it's a good idea to assume that any legal issue is NOT straightforward. Doing otherwise usually ends up making me look ignorant, and has me spreading false conclusions to other non-lawyers around me.
maxxxxx 10y ago
I would describe the law as "spaghetti code" with a lot of side effects and undefined behavior :-)
samfisher83 10y ago
I would describe it more like Sabre (Airline booking system). Where there are so many different rules you end up some crazy pricing rules cause there are just like a million different rules evolved over time, and no really knows why it happens.

devoply 10y ago

> Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased. If they are owned by rich people, maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe it's a way to spread their wealth to the lesser fortunate. Heh.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
The legal process here also spreads wealth around, just in a more liquid form. Rather than owning 1/16 of some parcel of land completely enclosed by Zuckerberg's compound, the lesser fortunate will get cash instead.
- devoply 10y ago
  But if they actually had the parcel they could negotiate with the billionaire himself which would lead to a better pay-off. Which would be the main problem that this system circumvents. The secondary problem is those pesky natives coming on your land. There is that Silicon Valley billionaire dealing with that in California if I remember, Kholsa, in his case it's so they can access the public beach.
  - koolba 10y ago
    Looks like Zuck is getting in front of those problems by preemptively building a wall around the property: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/29/technology/mark-zuckerberg-wall/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/29/technology/mark-zuckerberg-w...
    - local_kauai 10y ago
      The wall is built and the locals are pissed
wmil 10y ago
It's a bad thing. It prevents people from investing in developing the land. Areas without a clear title tend to be poor because as soon as someone tries to build a factory, workshop, business, or even just a nice house they're hit with multiple lawsuits.

wmeredith 10y ago

This is my understanding of the situation as well. If this action wasn't taken the land could potentially never see use. I think Zuck is a scumbag, but this is as much a broken legal system's fault as his.

jhowell 10y ago
I think that possibly the amount of land he's claiming for personal use could be a problem as well. But this too is an option available to him under the law.
shabda 10y ago
Land owned in the commons, by community, or with a large group of people is hardly a new concept. It seems a broken legal concept because it has become uncommon now, but it was a very common way to hold land just a few centuries ago: Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure This whole situation also reminds me a bit of the Vogons destroying earth: "There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams."
- harryh 10y ago
  This is not common land though. If it was it could just be owned by the government (like national parks) and that would work fine. This is private land owned by a large number of people (many of who might not even realize it).

slim 10y ago

> Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased. Such a need for strict definition of ownership (beyond any natural meaning) is the actual colonialism as felt by the indigenous

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
test6554 10y ago
If clear ownership existed beforehand, then the conflict would never have occurred. Now that clear ownership will be established, all future conflict can be avoided or quickly solved. Ownership, regardless of who owns it provides a path to resolution.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  In societies that value social cohesion: the conflict can be avoided in a manner that is not 'zero-sum' in the manner property rights are. Without passing judgement on pros or cons; if someone from a foreign land xomes to you and insists that you adopt their ways of dealing with ownership and abandon your own, that is colonialism. Rephrasing GP with emphasis: > Such a need for strict definition of ownership (beyond any natural meaning) is the actual colonialism as felt by the indigenous
- mindslight 10y ago
  You're missing the point that the framework of exclusive ownership is not universally applicable. Try applying your reasoning to eg administration of the atmosphere. The same type of colonization is happening to our information environment via the imposition of "imaginary property".
  - pc86 10y ago
    > Try applying your reasoning to eg administration of the atmosphere. You mean in terms of airspace? Because that's a thing but it ends at space, which nobody owns. It's a system that works pretty well.

rayiner 10y ago

I don't see where adverse possession figures into it. The basic problem is actually very common in agrarian populations and not unique to Hawaii. Dad owns plot of land. Brother A gets half, Brother B gets half. Brother A's two kids get 1/4 each, as do Brother B's two kids. A lot of the kids leave the land, but retain an ownership interest, and eventually you end up with two acres that have dozens of owners. It's a huge problem on indian reservations, for example: https://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/interior-standing-rock-sioux-tribe-sign-agreement-to-reduce-land-ownership-fractionation-in-indian-country https://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/interior-standing-roc.... A quiet title action and partition by sale is not a "legal hack." A quiet title action is a structured process for unifying title while compensating people with ownership interests. And because a single clear title in a property is much more valuable than a bunch of possessory interests in the same property (even put together), partition by sale maximizes the value of the land. So each person's share of the auction proceeds will be more than the market value of their original possessory interests. None of this is indicative of anything being "broken." It's basically unavoidable so long as fractional interests in land and subdivision of interests on inheritance are permitted.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
I thought that adverse possession is what allows brother A to sell without the permission of brother B's distant grandchild. But as I said, I know only what I've learned via today's jetlag + modafinil fueled googling session.
- rayiner 10y ago
  When dad dies and brother A and brother B each get half the land, they end up as joint tenants. Even if brother B then moves away and brother A uses the whole property for himself, adverse possession won't apply, unless brother A gives brother B "unequivocal" notice of his intention to claim sole ownership of the property. (Adverse possession between joint tenants requires a much more aggressive show of sole ownership than adverse possession generally.) But brother A can still sell his interest in the land. Whoever buys it steps into brother A's shoes--they're joint tenants with brother B (or his descendants). That's basically what Zuckerberg did. And as a joint tenant, he can seek a partition, which basically tells the court "hey, I don't want to share possession of this land, auction it and cash out everyone's interest."

tejohnso 10y ago

This is a legitimate and reasonable process that occurs frequently in mainland US as well. Especially if you purchase land at auction. Part of the process involves publishing efforts to ensure that all potentially affected parties are made aware of the action. Creditors are hesitant to deal with any questionable land until title has been quieted by this process so they know the purchaser has full ownership and there can be no further disputes. The quiet title process is a request for all those with interest in the land to speak up and resolve the situation. This prevents, for example, handing out a construction mortgage for someone to build a home on the land and then realizing three years later that your collateral is in jeopardy because several entities have decided to dispute the mortgagee's right to that land after the home was built.