Vinod wants you to think this debate is over property rights, but it's really just a game of expensive cat and mouse between him and the government for his own amusement. The road in question services over a dozen homes, and he has no building or presence on his property, so logistically there's no warrant for the gate. The gate was re-opened (for at least daytime hours) a few years ago. The beach had previously been accessible to the public for nearly 100 years.
The legal fees Vinod is paying are far greater than what he'd have to pay to maintain rightful public access. He likely didn't understand the access issue at the time of purchase (since he's never actually there!) and so this protracted argument was the only way for him to derive value from his purchase.
California courts have already held in this case that there is no "public trust" access to the beach, due to the peculiarities of land titles that originated in Mexico before Californian statehood.
A California court of appeals has now held that the State's other hook, the idea that the property was "dedicated to public use" is also baseless. That's what this article is about: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF
> That said, we have been tasked here with reviewing a trial court’s application of the common law of public dedication, which is the sole legal basis for Friends’ remaining claims in this case.
> We have endeavored faithfully to follow the prior holdings of our Supreme Court and fellow appellate courts in applying common law of public dedication principles here. However, we have not attempted to extend the public dedication doctrine beyond the common law parameters previously recognized by court decisions in this state. As strong as the coastal access policies of our state are, we do not understand them to empower us to do so.
There is no "rightful public access" to this property.
I don't see how Vinod is any different than the Sea Ranch authority in the mid 1970s. Precedent is not in Vinod's favor.
The California Coastal Access law was based on Sea Ranch blocking access to the ocean in the mid 1970s. All building at Sea Ranch was blocked until Sea Ranch put in access trails to the beach. The temporary Coastal Access law was then made permanent.
I don't feel sorry for someone of means buying property without any understanding of California state law. Vinod is claiming property rights he never had.
The appellate court held that his beach was not subject to California’s “public trust” doctrine due to title tracing back to a Mexican land grant before California statehood. That was in 2016.
All the litigation since then had been only a different, much weaker theory that the Martin’s beach owners dedicated the property to public use. Khosla just won that battle too.
Why are you so ardently defending a man who is so clearly in the wrong here? He is so much of an asshole about this that he's proud of it and boasts about it to look tough in VC meetings.
The spirit of the law in California is very obviously to provide public access to all beaches without exception. Good job on his lawyers on finding a weird ancient technicality to lean millions of dollars on but it's bullshit and he and everyone else knows it.
Vinod is literally the evil heartless corporate billionaire in 80's movies who wants to bulldoze the small town rec center. He arrests surfers trying to go to their own public beach and brags that he's never even set foot on the property and couldn't care less about it besides the "principal" of property rights.
Second, since the time of Justinian (527-565 AD), the public trust doctrine applied to the land up to the high tide line, and covered navigation and fishing. Then in 1971 the California Supreme Court discovered the right to surf and sunbathe in that ancient doctrine. Gee, it was hiding in there the whole time! California 100% deserved to be one-upped by Khosla. The fact that Khosla did so by invoking his rights under a treaty that pre-dated the state of California itself just makes it all more delicious.
Third, the California Coastal Commission proved itself the bad guys. It wasn't happy with even the California Supreme Court's made-up version of the public trust doctrine. It's inconvenient to sunbathe on just the tidal land, so the CCC demanded that Khosla run a public beach on his property. An unelected agency extracting concessions from a private property owner beyond what the law provides for is third-world country levels of government abuse.
The only thing that could make this better would be if Khosla sued the CCC for wasting his time and money.
In California I am pretty sure that private property starts at high tide for the ocean and low tide for other bodies of water.
So you are not talking about proposition 20 which starts at high tide and extends 1000 yards inland, you are talking about the land between high tide and low tide which I am pretty sure Vinod does not own.
I am not sure what you think he won in this particular case. Proposition 20 still holds (from everything I can tell). To overthrow prop 20 he would have to overthrow the will of the people. This is (by the way) why most of us oppose Vinod. He might be a great guy in other ways.
Why are you making this about character and personality. Vinod bought a property advertised as having particular rights associated. Does it have these or not? Clearly the courts should decide.
Want to visit this beach urgently? Get a kayak.
Is this your first introduction to how the rule of law works? It turns out that law, properly applied, doesn't care if the person it's being applied to is "evil and heartless". And pointing out what the law says isn't anywhere near a defense (ardent or otherwise) of the person whose favor it falls in.
If I understand the case correctly (I am not a lawyer) Vinod still needs approval of the California Coastal Commission to restrict access. I believe the case only struck down the argument that the previous owner formed a precedent since they charged for parking.
I will go back to not worrying about this case. I was worried Vinod was overturning California law which would really irk me.
Rightful public access is what the government of California is unless the federal government steps in and says otherwise. Vinod doesn't have a case really, he just has a stable of lawyers. It's probably just something to keep him from getting bored in his old age.
That was my understanding as well - this goes back (or at least that's Khosla's argument) to before California became a part of the US.
Interestingly, property right dating back to Mexican land grants are respected in the US as a part of the agreement that settled the Mexican American War.
I don't know enough to say whether that's a valid argument in this particular case.
It's not only a valid argument, it's exactly what the California court of appeals held in this case. From the law review article I linked:
> While the public trust doctrine can protect access rights over private land, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to extend that protection to private land certified under the 1851 federal law implementing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where the federal or state government had not asserted an interest in title proceeding. Therefore, the court of appeal in Friends I found that, because the Martin’s Beach property had been certified under the 1851 law without any mention of a public interest and never passed into state ownership, there could be no common law public trust easement over the land to the water.
> And while California courts hold that Article X, section 4 of the California Constitution affirms and codifies “at least in part” the public trust doctrine of coastal access, “absent clear legislative intent to the contrary,” the access requirements do not apply retroactively.26 Applying this constitutional principle, the court held that section 4 could not protect public access to Martin’s Beach since it was passed decades after the property became privately owned.
This is exactly how Vinod’s lawyers want you to see this: some complicated and interesting legal case. While you might be accurate about the details, it’s not within the public interest to see those details as relevant. The truth is that Vinod bought a property overestimating it’s value and this legal nonsense is how he tries to recoup from his mistake. It is not within the taxpayers interests to entertain him.
no name-calling here, boss. I very much agree with you that his credulity seems unlikely to be wide-eyed. I wonder how I could have better described his credulity.
"parroting" and "wide-eyed credulity" and "absurd grasping-at-straws" count as calling names in the sense that the site guidelines use that term: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't think your comment needed to "describe his credulity" at all, because that's not the topic here, and it's a step into making the discussion personal, which is always best avoided in a disagreement. A better comment would have added more substantiating information about how judges have already refuted what rayiner was saying.
I'm literally just describing rulings of the california appeals courts, as described in the Berkeley legal journal article referenced in my post and TFA. Khosla lost a bunch of intermediate court rulings, and the Supreme Court denied cert with respect to collateral proceedings involving the Coastal Commission.
But in two california appellate court wins, he knocked out both bases on which Friends of Martins Beach was claiming the right to public access of his beach. What's left?
Did you not read the relevant portion of California's constitution? If any judicial ruling or people like yourself find any ambiguity to those words, we'll make sure to clear them up for you in future legislative acts.
Please read the article I linked, it describes exactly what the California court of appeals has said in this case.
In particular, the Supreme Court held that in 1984 that this provision of the California constitution can't override the scope of property right that conveyed from Mexico/Spain after the Meixcan-American war: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=122714134443780....
The California court of appeals has already applied that precedent to this case. That was resolved years ago.
So what? That's not to say Congress isn't able to resolve this through their own legislation.
The judicial branch only interprets the law; they don't make it.
Even Congress can't override a ratified treaty with a law. Treaties are the law of the land.
Edit: The president can unilaterally withdraw from a treaty, and Congress can certainly repeal a treaty (or even edit it) using the typical lawmaking process. But passing a simple law isn't going to override a treaty on it's own. And it would almost certainly have international repercussions.
That said, in this case, the rights have already been granted to the property owners by the US in the form of a converted land patent, and changing that retroactively would almost certainly count as an expropriation / taking anyway.
So you might as well expropriate from the get go, without going to the trouble of dealing with Congress.
Wouldn't that make treaties useless if you can just back out of them (unless of course that is a party violates its tenents). I am pretty sure that a treaty supercedes any other laws or judicial decisions unless one of the parties breaks the agreed upon treaty.
Backing out isn't as bad as just breaking/ violating it, but yes, international reputation rests on a country keeping promises made in treaties.
And in the US, the supremacy clause of the Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2) states that ratified treaties are the "supreme law of the land," second only to the Constitution itself.
The Supreme Court, in it's famous Holland ruling, clarified that this includes laws and policy that otherwise would be a State matter, like land rights.
psst..pretty sure the judicial branch already went off the rails on that and has been actively making laws instead of interpreting them ergo "judicial activism"
On the "dedicated to public use" issue Khosla won at trial and (as the bloomberg article says) also won on appeal. So it seems like at least some judges have agreed with him.
I think he said that he views it as a moral issue and he doesn't believe he should be compelled by the government to directly provide a public service, or something to that effect. And although I have to take him at face value, my initial impression was that it was a case of the risk-logic that is required to do VC: betting heavy on a high value longshot. If we wins the property is even more valuable due to the privacy element and because he has shown how costly it was to achieve. If he loses he just takes his beating and moves on.
> I think he said that he views it as a moral issue and he doesn't believe he should be compelled by the government to directly provide a public service, or something to that effect.
Yes, absolutely. I’m a high taxation statist. But tax me, spend it in whatever public services you want, and then leave me alone. This sort of case-by-case exercise where state and municipal governments impose random unfunded mandates on individuals is incompatible with the idea of “government of laws, not if men.” The government shouldn’t make anyone keep running a public beach just because there used to be one in the property. Especially where there was no public vote, just an agency making a case by case decision.
In terms of morality the government directly controls one third of the economy I want to live in a world where they legislate wisely and enforce laws effectively in a clear and transparent way. In terms of reality I can only observe and describe.
It's also a horrible business practice for his VC fund. As an entrepreneur there's no way I would want to work with Khosla ventures. He just comes across as an asshole and a bully in this fight.
> It's also a horrible business practice for his VC fund. As an entrepreneur there's no way I would want to work with Khosla ventures.
And therein lies the rub. Many entrepreneurs will not care about stuff like this because his money is still green. The Uber CEO just the other day referred to the Kashoggi killing as a "mistake". Adam Neumann grew up in Israel but is happy to take money from the same pot KSA uses to fund extremist groups, and publicly claims that MBS and Jared Kushner (!) will save the world.
Imagine if everyone who disagrees with you was greedy. People couldnt hold those views for other reasons, and you're definitely not making a caricature instead of discussing reality.
Would their resistance matter when the government hears the potential dollar amount?
I'm in the United States I don't know where you're from but if we had an asshole tax our government would be the most incomprehensibly rich entity in the universe.
This seems like an arbitrary distinction. What makes you think this and not something like "all geographic features belong to all of us"? What makes beaches and rivers so special that rights suddenly don't apply?
What makes you think this shouldn't extend to all geographic features? Why do we have property rights to land?
Owning land merely means being the last in a line of people who enriched themselves on the backs of others by taking common property and depriving everybody else.
I'm curious to know what alternate, practical solutions there might be. The current system mostly work. Are you proposing no one can own land and hence no one can build exclusive homes/establishments? Anyone is free to build anywhere and pray no one else wants to move in at will? How will such a system work?
The place to start looking is Journal of the Commons. Communal ownership with limited privileges of individual use have been a regular feature of mankind's societies for a long, long time.
The Georgist or geolibertarian positions on this center around a Land Value Tax, sometimes believed to be the only necessary tax. Someone does own the land, but is taxed at a rate that captures the entire value of the (unimproved) land, so in some ways it's more akin to rent, which neutralizes some of the historic advantages certain groups enjoyed.
This tax is essentially paid to the public to compensate them for being excluded from the land. The tax moves up as the value of the land increases, so idle landowners do not capture the value themselves, and may be forced to sell to people who will put it to more productive use.
The solution is to ban development in large stretches of North America, tear down the fences, and return the land to an open ecological preserve, like it was before colonial settlement in the 19th century. New England underwent something like this after farms started being abandoned in the middle of the 19th century.
Doesn't the California state constitution make this distinction? At least for beaches?
Rivers are more complicated than other geographic features because what you do upstream can affect me downstream so it makes sense to have some more rules around them, or even treat them as public.
Also, waterways and their adjacent lands are historically open to the public as a means of transportation, not for recreation or some other community notion of sharing pretty spaces.
"Historically" doesn't sound like a good argument for future proof solution of this problem. In Ukraine, it is illegal to block access to any coastal line, sea, river or lake, even if it's private property. You can put up a fence 25 to 100m inland from the lake or river (depends on the size of water body) or 2km from the sea coast, but beaches are for everyone.
Historically is a legal argument based on common law precedent, not a philosophical argument.
At some point over a thousand years ago, some judge decided it was in the public's best interest that ships be allowed to beach themselves on the nearest toshore/bank without fear of consequence.
(Which is why the high tide line makes sense, as far as where to draw the line.)
They didn't want captains to hesitate if a boat was in distress.
Similarly, sailors getting off a distressed ship shouldn't fear consequences leaving a beached ship, and walking along the coast to the next port.
It's the same logic as a broken down car's driver being allowed to walk down the shoulder of the interstate highway to get to the next exit for help.
This right of passage came about due to interest of public safety; it had nothing to do with public "ownership" of the shoreline, especially for the purposes of enjoyment or recreation.
Now, you could argue it should be the public's right to enjoy all beaches recreationally, but that would require a separate political (as opposed to judicial) process, and would/should be considered a public taking (expropriation), where the land owner has a right to compensation at Fair Market Value, plus expenses.
Water access is particularly valuable compared to other natural features. Equating access to a river and a mountain peak is perhaps unintentional, but not useful here. Transport, use of water, even bathing and recreation are all common and valid uses, that belong to the people, and not to any entity who may seek to monopolize it.
It’s a shame to read about these legal arguments that hang on technicalities (whether previous access was tied to private parking or not) as opposed to what surely must be the actual issue: the public’s right of access to the scarce national resource of beaches.
Technicalities are part have having a rule of law. The legislature (or at the formation of a governmental system) is where the issues get debated and the law determined.
> Technicalities are part have having a rule of law. The legislature (or at the formation of a governmental system) is where the issues get debated and the law determined.
I think there are valid philosophical differences that significantly affect how the system interprets technicalities. I understand the US takes an approach that's much like code: specify everything precisely in great detail, and technicalities and loopholes can be exploited to subvert the original intent of the law. I may be mistaken on this, but understand the EU tends to laws that specify broader principles, so technicalities and loopholes aren't as useful.
The US approach leads to more precise and consistent application, at the expense of flexibility and achieving the original purpose of the law easier to subvert or avoid. The EU approach leads to less consistent application in corner cases, but is more flexible and harder to subvert the original purpose.
Apologies if I got the EU case wrong, please correct me if I did.
Personally I wish the US tended more towards the EU approach: so in this case if California law mandates public beach access, Khosla needs to provide it somehow, and can't weasel out of it on a technicality.
The legal philosophy is actually the opposite. Common Law is heavily based upon precedent and what the norms of the community are to “fill in the gaps”. The vast majority of what goes into a decision is this historical case law. The actual legal text is more of a framework than exhaustive guide.
Much of Europe works with civil law where everything is expected to be codified beforehand. Past cases have little bearing on how a new one will be decided.
In theory, civil law can still be technical or principled. It's a set of instructions used to make a decision. The interpreter then decides, maybe based on law maybe based on precedent, or a mix.
If a case has been litigated in the past then you should get the same result if the facts are the same. It's the party with the case law on their side's responsibility to demonstrate past rulings that support them. If you spend time watching legal shows you'll see them use the word "precedent" a lot for this reason.
Of course the facts being the same is the big "if". Jury verdicts are also not strictly bound to precedent the way judges are.
What you're talking about is a feature of common-law.
I'm talking about civil law or codified jurisdictions. The ancestor comment confused the US for being a (mostly) codified system, which is why I quoted that, but it was really about describing civil law as being "precise and consistent".
Not a lawyer, but counter-intuitively I think it ends up working the other way around. Because in civil law the law itself reigns supreme and can't be "fixed" in the courts, the law must be error-free, which is why you'd generally want to write it in a vague way with room for interpretation. In common law, interpretation is equal to the letter, so lawmakers can afford to be specific without breaking stuff.
>so in this case if California law mandates public beach access, Khosla needs to provide it somehow, and can't weasel out of it
I think people may be misunderstanding here a bit. This case is regarding access above the high tide line. Access below the high tide line is not in question. I'm just thinking from a lot of the comments I'm reading on both sides of this issue that people really aren't quite grasping the question being settled.
In essence, the only thing being debated, is whether or not Khosla has to provide a road and convenient parking above the beach. Predictably, the courts are saying the obvious, "No he doesn't." Why? Because he is obliged by law to make the beach below the high tide line accessible.
FOMB will likely lose their case because, as a series of judges are now making more clear, the public is only entitled to keep the beach proper public. (ie-below the high tide line.)
Also, the courts are not being paid off here by the wealthy in an attempt to disenfranchise the public. The base issue is one of definitions. Obviously, globally speaking, high tide line has served as a fairly convenient, and somewhat obvious definition of "beach". The question you have to answer if you change that is, if the property line is not at the high tide line, then where is it? That's the point at which you start to run into problems, with some saying it's high tide plus maybe 100m? Others might say high tide plus 400m, while still others could claim high tide plus 800m and on, and on, and on.
> I think people may be misunderstanding here a bit. This case is regarding access above the high tide line. Access below the high tide line is not in question. I'm just thinking from a lot of the comments I'm reading on both sides of this issue that people really aren't quite grasping the question being settled.
It seems perfectly sensible to me to require a public access easement to reach the beach below the high tide line. It's a mockery of public access if the only access is by sea.
> FOMB will likely lose their case because, as a series of judges are now making more clear, the public is only entitled to keep the beach proper public. (ie-below the high tide line.)
If you're correct, the law should be amended to require a public access easement.
The issue is that even if you get the easement, it only has to be to the land below the high tide line. So either way, Khosla would be under no obligation to maintain, or even keep, the current road and parking. As all of the current infrastructure is above the high tide line. That's the essential problem.
Also:
>It's a mockery of public access if the only access is by sea
It's the high tide line that is the marker, not the low tide line. So access is always by land.
The issue is that the current custom is to access via the road and parking above the high tide line. That's what locals are accustomed to, that's what is being taken away by Khosla, and that's what the suit is about.
Not quite, because legally, whether the custom was licensed or not matters. By paying the fee to park and cross the property, the public implicitly recognized his private property rights (which means the public didn't have any presumption of a public right-of-way, or even prescriptive easement).
It's the public version of squatters rights, and you can't claim squatters rights if you've been paying rent the whole time.
Codification of everything does not lead to more consistent application, since it's impossible to code for every possible scenario, and every decision depends on the interpretation of the particular jurist reading the code. Which means in a "pure" codified legal framework, stare decisis is not a thing.
The US has certainly leaned more towards codification since it's inception, but it is still primarily and very much a common law jurisdiction at heart.
> The US approach leads to more precise and consistent application, at the expense of flexibility and achieving the original purpose of the law easier to subvert or avoid. The EU approach leads to less consistent application in corner cases, but is more flexible and harder to subvert the original purpose.
What you're overlooking is that laws are often compromises, and governments routinely invoke "the spirit of the law" to end-run around previously made compromises.[1] That's why the US approach is such a stickler for things like textualism (which is associated with conservatives, but is in reality the default interpretive style on both the left and right). "I'm only going to give you as much as I agreed on paper to give you and not an inch more."
[1] A great example of this is the Clean Water Act. There is a ton of fighting over what the phrase "waters of the united states" means. A bi-partisan coalition passed the CWA, intending it to allow the federal government to clean up the country's lakes and rivers. Lately, however, the same law has been interpreted to give the government authority to basically engage in building permitting involving "wetlands" that may be far from the sorts of lakes and rivers that Congress originally sought to address.
What about information asymmetry that makes it easy for some to manage these technicalities?
One billionaire can easily have a full-time team working for him to defend his case, and also buy politicians to do the same. In an oligarchy, technicalities can easily become tools of power.
But laws based on historical technicalities tend to lose sight of the big picture around which laws were originally designed.
Initially, access was completely free, then the government allowed one owner to collect parking fees from visitors, and now they try to ban all public access outright... Then before you know it, in line with historical technical trends, they will put us all in cages and force us to work for free.
The law is not about technicalities at all, that's BS. The law is irrational; it's all about feelings. It should reflect how the average person feels about things. That's why criminal court cases have a jury instead of a computer to decide on the verdict.
Surely that's the role of the courts? The legislature is there to provide broad guidance in the form of laws; it's judges and juries who agonize over these details and enshrine them in case law.
The "public's right of access" to the beach is not at issue in this case. (See pp. 429-430 of the above.) Private ownership of the land in question dates back to before California was a state. When the Mexican-American war ended, the United States entered into the Treat of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which among other things promised the protection of private property rights that had been granted by the Spanish and Mexican governments in the land that was being ceded to the United States. The California Lands Act of 1851 set up proceedings wherein Mexican and Spanish land titles were turned into U.S. federal patents (land titles).
More than a century later, California added Article X, sec. 4 to its constitution, which declared a public easement over tidal lands to be held for the benefit of the public. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court held that the federal Treaty obligation to protect the scope of private property rights that had been granted by the Spanish and Mexican governments could not be impaired by California's later assertion of a sovereign right of the public to access tidal waters: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=122714134443780...
Because California had not asserted any public easement in the proceedings under the 1851 act, Khosla's beach is not subject to the general right of the public to access beaches. (See pp. 430 of the above.)
This whole litigation is therefore about a different issue entirely: the public dedication doctrine, which says that private land can become subject to a public easement if "dedicated" to public use. That's where the whole "private parking" thing comes in. Martin's beach was operated as a beach accessible to the public, but where a fee was charged for access. That doesn't count as dedication to the public.
So this case is really about two things that aren't technicalities at all: (1) the relatively small number of California property titles granted by the Mexican and Spanish governments are protected under Treaty against later State assertions of authority; and (2) the difference between dedicating private property to public use, and selling access to property to members of the public.
More generally, technicalities matter. Anglo legal systems like ours are not only about governing society, but protecting individuals and their property from the government. That's why the Magna Carta is a long list of things the King can't do, many of which are the foundation for our Bill of Rights. Protections of private property from seizure by the government for "public purposes" is right there in the Constitution, in the Takings Clause. The United States has thus been fastidious in protecting private property rights inherited from England, Spain, France, etc.
This is also about not changing the rules after the fact. There's lots of fair ways to structure a society. But it undermines notions of rule of law for the government to change the terms of the bargain after-the-fact. A state could be entirely justified in declaring that all oil fields in the state belongs to the state to lease for the benefit of the public. But the state should not be able to sell oil fields to private parties, and then come back later and declare that "in the public interest" the state should get half of all the oil production.
Many governmental abuses result from ignoring "technicalities" in favor of some vaguely-defined (and usually opportunistic) view of the "public's right[s]." The government gives out a property right, because it doesn't have the capital to develop the property itself, and then tries to get more than it bargained for once someone has taken the time to develop that property. One of the things that has made America so successful is that we don't do that. (And instances where we have done that, such as with treaty obligations to Native Americans, are rightfully a source of national shame.)
> This is also about not changing the rules after the fact. There's lots of fair ways to structure a society. But it undermines notions of rule of law for the government to change the terms of the bargain after-the-fact.
Surely that happens all the time, though?
I mean, if I brought a car factory in 1950 is it unjust that the government changed the deal by forcing me to start supplying seatbelts in the 1960s?
Oftentimes it's unavoidable. You operate businesses subject to the (legitimate) right of the government to create laws of general applicability. But there is a spectrum.
In this case, a California court of appeals found that there was no "public trust" right to access the beach years ago. So what did the state do? It pursued a frivolous theory based on the idea that just because someone has been operating a public beach, they and all their successors must keep operating a public beach. That's not a law of general application "requiring everyone to put seatbelts in cars." That's abuse targeting a single individual and his property.
Knowing HN, yeah, they probably consider seatbelts extreme big government overreach lol. "Let the market decide what safety devices people want! You're just raising costs for everyone with these unnecessary nannies!"
This is just me, a non lawyer, talking. But I kinda feel like the SCOTUS cases you reference were wrongly decided. When CA asserted its public easement over tidal lands it's hard for me to see why a taking from a regular piece of land should be any different than a piece of land that happened to be governed by the Mexican government over a century ago.
At some point doesn't the past have to become the past?
I think Khosla should be allowed to shut down the parking lot, but be required to maintain some sort of minimal road/path easement.
I should really read the full SCOTUS decision though before feeling confident in this POV.
> This is just me, a non lawyer, talking. But I kinda feel like the SCOTUS cases you reference were wrongly decided. When CA asserted its public easement over tidal lands it's hard for me to see why a taking from a regular piece of land should be any different than a piece of land that happened to be governed by the Mexican government over a century ago.
Because part of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were that Mexicans residing in land ceded to the US at the time would retain certain rights.
Is Khosla Mexican or descended from the Mexican landowners? Why were the special property rights of the Mexican landowners under the treaty passed to subsequent US owners of the land? So now there is land in CA that is not federal or native-American land, but it is not subject to CA laws. That's the part that doesn't seem logical in this.
Also maybe how CA could end this situation: pass a law that all current property rights are guaranteed, but only rights recognized under current CA law are conveyed at sale. Or maybe it needs to be a US law--or a treaty amendment with Mexico.
> So now there is land in CA that is not federal or native-American land, but it is not subject to CA laws. That's the part that doesn't seem logical in this.
Just wanted to point out that this kind of arrangement exists already for things like embassies.
> Also maybe how CA could end this situation: pass a law that all current property rights are guaranteed, but only rights recognized under current CA law are conveyed at sale. Or maybe it needs to be a US law--or a treaty amendment with Mexico.
I don't sympathize with Khosla and admit that I haven't fully researched the impacts of the treaty but it does seem like something most easily resolved by the federal government.
Which any soon to be property owner would know before buying a place. If the rules were a surprise to Mr Khosla he should be suing his realtor and not the state.
Well, as a fellow swede I can say that this is only half the story, because not only do we have the very extensive right to roam law, but we also have an additional law regarding this in particular called "Strandskydd" (literally beach protection) which makes it very hard and exceptional to make a coast line private.
In Nordic (and other European) countries the access right is much broader, not restricted to beaches. It's called Freedom to Roam [1]. Exclusivity of private property is not an unambiguous universal.
As a Swede living in California, I think I have some knowledge of this.
I don't think the Swedish "Allemansrätten" would allow the public to a beach in front of someone's home, as the California rule does, and as this fight is about.
I don't know how close this specific billionaire housing unit is to the beach, so I can't speak to this case, but the Swedish rule is less permissive than the California one.
I would also observe that these "right to roam" rules work well in sparsely populated places like Scandinavia, but you won't see much of them in more dense jurisdictions.
California is pretty much the size of Sweden, but with 4x the population.
In Canada we don't have those rights. But we do have mineral rights in northern regions where anyone can stake a claim on private property for mineral rights. It's as simple as marking around the area.
In fact, I'd claim that there are almost no jurisdictions where there are no limitations on the control of private property.
Even if we limit it to "just" restrictions on public access, I don't think there are many jurisdictions that don't have carve-outs that provides protections for public access of some sort to some private land.
The reason, of course, being that most countries have traditions of access that long pre-dates modern property law, and that had to be accommodated.
In Norway, the freedom to roam was considered so intrinsic to Norwegian culture that is was not even mentioned in law until the 1960's, because it was considered "obvious", despite the fact that the Norwegian legal system is based on codified laws with very limited use of precedents, and certainly no "common law" element. In a completely opposite way of seeing it, Sweden embedded it in their constitution, because it was considered such an innate right.
While the expansive freedom to roam of the Nordic countries, is relatively rare, ensuring public access to the shore has been considered not just an issue of leisure access, but an issue of guaranteeing economic interests and food safety for centuries in a large proportion of countries with shore lines, and so has been very widespread - countries that don't guarantee access to the "dry" part of the beach have often still guaranteed access to the tidal zone, for example, to allow for fishing, or gathering mussels etc.
The idea that some people have of property rights as something exclusive just does not match reality - there's been a very acute recognition in most legal systems that property rights restricts the freedoms of the general public, and that as a consequence some trade-off must be made. The question is generally not if one needs to be made, but how extensive the right of public access should be.
Hawaii's beaches are all open to the public. County governments and private developers are required to provide public access and parking in areas where the shoreline is dominated by residential dwellings.
> Managing access to scarce resources is the primary purpose of the system of private property.
The purpose of private property is economic. Locke's theory of private property was that because a laborer improves nature through their labor, they are thus entitled to the fruits of said labor, with the intention that they will keep up the land better than common land. In other words, they worked hard to develop their garden, so they get exclusive management of it. The result of this work on the land was intended to result in improved economic output.
But the quality of the land, or the result of the labor of its management, is a separate concern from access. We're talking about wanting the public to have access, not for it to be kept better, or to be used as an economic tool. According to (at least one) theory of private property, an individual owner could still maintain it properly while allowing public access to it. And that's probably why a UK law allows the public to roam on private property (well, that and traditional rights).
Scotland has a right of access to land (including beaches) as well as inland water throughout the country. This is known as 'the right to roam' and is a good example of a jurisdiction where statutory right of access works well: https://www.scotways.com/faq/law-on-statutory-access-rights
I'm not sure that's true. I'm pretty sure almost every state with beaches (inland or ocean) has laws that provide for public access to the beaches. How far reaching they are - and how they're enforced - would require more research.
It's often in the form of public right to use the coastline below mean high water or something along those lines. However, that often does not include an automatic right to land access. The details vary mostly at the state level.
> the three-judge panel upheld a trial judge’s ruling in Khosla’s favor, finding there was substantial evidence that the previous owners didn’t intend to dedicate the road for public use because they charged fees.
Why does it matter what the previous owner(s) did? The law states there must be public access to the beach. This is an 89 acre parcel of land, providing not even a single access point sounds like the owner could be blocking an appreciable amount of ocean frontage.
The law is not implemented like that. Basically if there is a property which does not provide through-access to the beach, the law does not require them to provide it. If any change is made to the property, including improvements, then as part of the permitting process a requirement will be made to provide the access.
This is why at California beach areas and piers, old buildings have no access, but all remodeled ones do.
That all said, still amazingly entitled behavior by Khosla.
What I don't understand is why the road isn't an easement by necessity on the land with the dominant estate being the public beach. If the beach were private property the owner of the beach could certainly claim an easement exists and that the servient estate (Khoslas) illegally terminated the easement. Is there some kind of exclusion for easements by necessity for public lands?
Because legally, charging a fee means it wasn't a public easement, it was licensed access across private land.
If you're arguing that it should be "taken" as an easement of necessity, that's separate, and a more political question.
Easements by necessity are granted generally when no other access is possible; they're not for convenience.
Additionally, (for private party transactions anyway) the party that creates the encumbrance is who is responsible for granting access. If you're not responsible for isolating the tract of land, then there's not (usually) any requirement to grant an easement. And even if there is, it wouldn't be a public easement.
And by responsible, I mean in terms of land transactions and changes in law, not putting up a gate.
When faced with the nearly limitless resources of a government agency, most people put in a similar situation have no choice but surrender or face bankruptcy.
It's only unusual because when having a disagreement with the government, 99.99% of us can't afford to fight the government based on principle.
Because the law was written at a time when some beaches were already private property, and so its provisions were written to grandfather in existing private beaches while preventing future ones from being created. So many legal arguments end up centering on the original usage of the land.
That's not correct. The California Constitution has always made beaches public[1].
The Coastal Commission was established in 1972 to improve access. The act grandfathered in properties with no access, but requires any improvement or change to pull a permit with the Commission. The Commission requires public access when approving any permit.
[1] Tidal beaches only. Beaches on lakes can be private
You're right the he is legally entitled. I wasn't clear enough: he is acting morally entitled. In this sense, "entitled" means a person who feels it is reasonable to use their wealth and power to do anything they want and other peoples wants are irrelevant.
The concept that property is so religiously sacred that simply owning of a thing entitles one to cause external harm using that thing, even passively, is sickening.
You must live in a different world than the real one, where restrictions on land use and ownership are quite common.
Land is a finite natural resource, coastline even more so. Restrictions that even the playing field such that the rich aren't able to privatize all the beachfront seems like a great idea to me.
If it wasn't for California's strong environmental restrictions there would be no coastline for Khosla to appreciate from his private property, or rather it would be a much different landscape.
Everyone else plays by these same rules.
Khosla is very conspicuously using his outsized monetary influence to the pervert the spirit of the law.
The concept of property being sacred is what drew a lot of people to America in the beginning. Instead of paying a Lord you could literally come to America and be given free land by the Federal government. It was a huge reason we rebelled against England in the first place.
In this situation is sucks for regular people but in a lot more situations it benefits everyone else.
> The concept of property being sacred is what drew a lot of people to America in the beginning.
That's not what you describe below.
> Instead of paying a Lord [sic] you could literally come to America and be given free land by the Federal government. It was a huge reason we rebelled against England in the first place.
I think the most important thing here is the free land aspect. Property ownership has never been "sacred" and was always subject to things like squatter's rights and other practical exceptions:
> The principles of homesteading and squatter's rights embody the most basic concept of property and ownership, which can be summarized by the adage "possession is nine-tenths of the law," meaning the person who uses the property effectively owns it. Likewise, the adage, "use it or lose it," applies. The principles of homesteading and squatter's rights predate formal property laws; to a large degree, modern property law formalizes and expands these simple ideas.
I don’t believe in squatters rights and I’m glad my state doesn’t have laws like the West Coast. There was a Reddit post recently where someone didn’t visit their property for 2-3 weeks. Someone moved in, broke everything, and then preemptively called the police to get squatters rights. Now the home owner has to go through a complicated eviction process and have his second home trashed.
> I don’t believe in squatters rights and I’m glad my state doesn’t have laws like the West Coast. There was a Reddit post recently where someone didn’t visit their property for 2-3 weeks. Someone moved in, broke everything, and then preemptively called the police to get squatters rights. Now the home owner has to go through a complicated eviction process and have his second home trashed.
There's a lot wrong with your comment:
1. It looks like all states have adverse possession laws [1].
2. 2-3 weeks wouldn't cut it anywhere to claim adverse possession. The shortest time required to be in possession is 5 years [1].
3. Why would you believe any anecdote that you read on Reddit? So many are lies posted to gain sweet e-points that all should be met with heavy skepticism.
I guess it's your right to not "believe in" squatters rights, but abandoned and underutilized property does society no good, and squatter's rights are a reasonable solution to that problem.
You aren't quite getting it. Lords controlling the land is property being sacred. A lot of people came to America because less property was already locked down by the rich. But if we treat "my great-grandfather stole this fair and square" as sacred, we'll end up in the same boat.
> Instead of paying a Lord you could literally come to America and be given free land by the Federal government. It was a huge reason we rebelled against England in the first place.
Yeah, because America had more lands than people, because European settlers (whether willingly or not) managed to wipe out most of its previous inhabitants. So it could literally afford to hand out free lands, and because it needed people, it lured people with that promise.
I'm not sure what's that got to do with property being sacred. Surely all those European lords and merchants also considered their own properties extremely sacred.
I don't think so. The concept of having spare land, sure. Private ownership of land is and always has been a social construct, subject to limits imposed by both society and physics. To claim that it is "sacred" is to misunderstand the nature of society.
Accordingly, modern (sub)urban land ownership has very little to do with Spanish and English colonial land grants or US settlers. It comes with huge social benefits and is encumbered by extensive permitting, taxation, and use limits. You'll notice that Vinod Khosla isn't interested in exchanging his Half Moon Bay property for, say, an equivalent amount of land in North Dakota, where he might be permitted to block public access all day long.
If the county wants to allow beach access they should build it or buy land. If it becomes a serious problem they should use eminent domain. The home owners shouldn’t be forced to build access.
This is a reduction to absurdity. Would you like it if anyone could just wander into your kitchen and take from the fridge? How about lie in bed with your spouse?
Nobody’s proposing that. The California state constitution is pretty clear that beaches are public access. Khosla more than most knew that going in, well before he was in a position to grab his rake and run up and down the beach yelling at sunbathers. This wasn’t a shocker. He wanted to litigate this case well before the ink was dry on the purchase papers, and kicked it off arguing the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American war superseded the state constitution. Fun fact: it did not.
Other jurisdictions like Australia have public access to beach rules. In much of Europe the same rules apply to much more inland areas too. And you know what? It works great there, and surprisingly, you can’t sleep with the spouse or anyone who owns beachfront property there either.
Coming into your house isn't even almost the same thing as walking through someone's yard.
Walking through someone's yard isn't a good comparison wither because a medium plot of land is maybe 4 thousand square feet and his property is 4 million square feet.
Coming from Norway, where this is a concept that is being taught from primary school, because we have extensively legally protected rights to access private land ("freedom to roam"), it always surprises me how difficult this distinction is to get for people.
We had it hammered into us from childhood, and it boiled down to getting us to think about what would affect us if people wanted to access our land, and what would have only minor effect, and what kind of access we might want to have that would have at most minor affect on the owner. It takes minimal prompting to get kids to come up with trade-offs that deals with the distinction of "walking through someone's yard" vs. "grant access to larger areas of land".
It was a founding priciple of America that we have the fundamental right to private property. We have no king/monarchy so private citizens can have complete ownership of the land as if they were a king.
Better comparison would be easements. Utility companies can dig up your hard because the city has granted them an easement. Some properties are land locked by other private properties so there is easement for access. Go anywhere in rural America and these easements are quite common. Granting easements for passage to a public resource follows the same principles.
Not sure why the downvotes. It's actually a reasonable question, the answer to which can vary by state. The details vary but, in some cases, having only water access to property--even if not an island--is considered access for purposes of the law. (For example, I believe in Maine it's OK to own a property that doesn't have a legal right of way by land.)
>I believe in Maine it's OK to own a property that doesn't have a legal right of way by land.
Maybe that's state law but legal easement is required in many municipalities, for example Kennebunkport will not let you surround a property with other people's property with no access to public property (the road)
It would be ironic if Khosla woke up one day to find a continuously-growing fleet of recreational and commercial boats including party barges with beach anchors, lights, speakers, generators and tons of booze using the beach, ferrying anyone who desired it to get to the beach from nearby beaches/docks, turning it into the worst destination party-scape he was trying to avoid tepid versions of in the first place. He just made it clear via the case that water access was permitted, he doesn't privately own the beach itself, and there are plenty of waterborne partiers in CA who would take him up on the "offer" of partying on an "exclusive" beach.
People pay big bucks on cruises to get to "exclusive" beaches, and there are any number of "entrepreneurs" who will jump at the chance to turn a quick dollar to ferry people to exactly such a beach (albeit created through a legal technicality than natural features), plus throw in the gratuitous "ogle a billionaire's house" in marketing schticks on top to goose the customer buy rate.
There might be a corollary of the Streisand Effect at work here...
He probably could take that into court and have that action taken down.
However, I'm not so clear that third parties wouldn't capitalize upon the exclusivity he just de jure created by restricting land access. But without actual ownership of the beach itself to turn it into private property, he might have unintentionally triggered a tragedy of the commons scenario, where he's raised the attractiveness of that particular spot of the beach without being able to charge and throttle access for it, and those third parties will be able to deliver that access and charge for it, without having to pay for the beach capex and opex itself.
This has the potential to be environmentally terrible, and I'd rather truly not see that happen, even though if it does happen it would make others in this thread happy on how much a Pyrrhic victory it would represent for Khosla.
I'm sure they'll then get you with noise complaints that the motors are too loud, then have boats banned from being within any meaningful distance of the beach.
Some of beach front lands were in private ownership before the access law passed. One notable example is Hollister ranch another is Martins beach. This lawsuit means that there's no pre-existing or effective easement for the road because the previous owners charged for access / parking. So as much as we want this land to be open and accessible, it is not. You can also legally access the beach by boat.
This case is misunderstood in a lot of ways. A couple of things worth noting:
- The beach up to the mean high tide line is public land by law. No one, including Khosla, disputes this.
- The sandy beach above the high tide line as well as a convenient parking lot was previously accessible to the public for a small fee. This is what Khosla wants to shut down and what Friends of Martin's Beach & The Surfrider Foundation have sued over. It seems fairly obvious to me (though perhaps not to others) that Khosla is in the right here. The private land is his. He can do what he wants with it.
- Kind of in the middle of these two issues is actual beach access. FOMB has insinuated that shutting down the parking lot and access to the sandy beach constitutes complete removal of access to the beach. This, however, isn't really clear. FOMB could very well lose their lawsuit while beach access was maintained via a small road or walking path through Khosla's property. Despite what most of the press has indicated, the actual lawsuit isn't really about this.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but when you own waterfront land in California, I wouldn't say you can generally do what you want with it. The CA deserts, on the other hand, make a property owner feel like they actually own the land.
For example, the Coastal Commission just prohibited hundreds of homes in Newport Beach from putting outdoor furniture on the sand, on their own private property (hundreds of meters from the actual water).
> It seems fairly obvious to me (though perhaps not to others) that Khosla is in the right here. The private land is his. He can do what he wants with it.
You and Khosla are both wrong. If an area is designated public land, you cannot de facto prevent all access by buying up all the land around it and refusing to provide any point of entry; you must provide an easement (and you can even charge a small fee for it, if you want). This is a very well-established bit of property law, and Khosla is only weaseling out of it on technicalities.
I covered access in my third bullet point. You are responding to something I said in my second bullet point. The conflating of these two distinct points is one of the core areas of misunderstanding surrounding the case.
I'd never thought about this before. How do property rights apply to enclaves? If I own all the land encircling another piece of land, what prevents me from barring access to the encircled piece of land? Are there laws forbidding this?
Typically the interior property will have a cross access easement, a legal document that gives them access across the encircling piece of land. This is also pretty common in commercial developments where you have to cross a parcel to get to an outlot in a development.
My grandparents' house had a small lane beside it which was a right-of-way or easement (not sure the terminology used here). It was for horse drawn coal wagons so they could reach the building behind my grandparents house. The rear house was facing a main street but there wasn't any driveway or way for the coal wagon to reach the rear of the house.
Then of course coal for home heating became obsolete but for the next 70 years the right-of-way existed. The home behind my grandparents had a driveway and a parking lot added to it. A fence was put up probably 75 years ago, turned posts, very old fence.
The home changed hands many times I even lived in it as a baby when the rear house was divided into apartments.
Now lawyers own the rear house and guess what they want? Yes they are demanding the 75 year-old fence be torn down. And they want to use the right-of-way for vehicles. Only the right-of-way is four maybe at most barely five feet wide bordered by my grandparents old home and the fence of the house beside it.
There it is the use of close to 80 year old disused narrow coal path now demanded by the latest owners of another property.
Interestingly, that's part of the issue in OP right? The existing private access road was grandfathered, so he could close it. But if Khosla made any changes requiring e.g. new permitting, providing access would have ended up as part of that. The difference being public vs private land, and you could theoretically come up the beach (not fully encircled).
If someone owns the encircled piece of land they can sue to force the owner of the surrounding land to allow access to the property. Usually they will be granted an easement to allow them to do so.
If you're interested, it's commonly referred to as landlocked property.
This is actually really common in Western States where billionaires like Ted Turner buy up massive chunks of land surrounding public Access land and then put up fences to keep people out.
Of course it's illegal and they're required to provide an easement but laws don't apply the same to billionaires
There are ecological benefits. Studies show that relatively inaccessible private and public beaches and wilderness have healthier ecosystems and less litter.
For example, even just regular trampling of sandy beaches impacts the local food chain:
Personally I think Khosla is doing everyone a favor here. All the free publicity over CA’s right to public beachfront, and it’s great motivation for the legislature to strengthen the laws around guaranteeing that access.
Without entitled billionaires fighting the system, it would be much harder to drum up support for stronger protections enshrined in law. They could call it the Khosla Act.
In all seriousness, CA should enforce the law they wrote, not the law they wish they had. But also, good luck if Khosla wants to so much as upgrade a circuit breaker, if I understand the law correctly, any permitted work on the property is an opportunity for the local building inspector to require a new public access road to be put in.
if I understand the law correctly, any permitted work on the property is an opportunity
FWIW, this permitting process is precisely the law that Khosla is challenging. He asserts that the state government doesn't have the right to such fine grained and arbitrary control of private property.
I don't know the area, but could someone setup a little business nearby ferrying people to and from the beach on a boat? How much did the previous owners charge for access? Would the same amount of money per trip make a ferrying business viable?
"Thank you for choosing Streisand Effect Charter Service, providing daily access to the hotspots of entitled Billionaires who abuse the legal system since 2019..."
It's a shame that so much energy is put into blocking public access to beaches.
This was on HN ~5 months ago, related topic: "Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay hit with $1.6 million penalty for failing to provide public beach access" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179511
The case against this here is fascinating. It’s basically a bunch of people who will likely never be able to afford their own beaches cheering on a billionaire as he takes the beach they currently have access to away from them because “freedom.” Yeah Mr Khosla, you take my beach! Wooo! You’re right, I shouldnt be allowed on there, I am the rif-raf after all.
This is basically the problem in a nutshell: people voting against their own interests because one day they may be rich (they won’t though, probably, because if everyone was rich nobody would be) and when they get there they want their own beach too. So they give their beach away to the wealthiest, and now nobody but Vinod has a beach. If instead they just agreed to share the beach they’d all have it now, but of course that’s un-American, apparently.
It seems on-the-face-of-it unlikely that any significant population imagines that they will one day be able to own a private beach, even if they are unjustifiably optimistic about their future wealth. I've been around a lot of people who have hopes about their level of future wealth, and that's not a level anyone thought they would achieve.
So, look, have you considered that when you try to make common cause with the whatever non-super-elite class of people you're trying to make common cause with, you do it in a way that doesn't make you a patronizing asshole? Because you're assuming that people are too dumb or brainwashed to "vote their interests" rather than that they have a different conception of their interests than you do
You are of course right that I was being neither tactful nor political and wasn’t really expecting to sway anyone already committed to the idea. However I’ll ask openly and genuinely: what does anyone stand to gain by allowing a wealthy individual to cudgel away their right to access a large swath of beachfront as enshrined in the California state constitution? To what benefit to ones self can you possibly point?
I couldn't care less about this rich person's beach nor the people who want to surf on it, but I do care about the property rights issue at play here and how it intermingles with popular perception and treatment of "rich people" (a relative term that, for most people reading this, almost certainly is applied pejoratively to them by those who have less than they do). I don't like the idea that someone feeling entitled to something I own factors into the question of control over that thing -- I worked and paid for it, I should get to do what I want with it. It seems to me that this simple principle is thrown out when the owner is deemed "rich", which is frightening to me.
> To what benefit to ones self can you possibly point?
I worry that tolerating the entitlement of the many over the rights of the few will result in a degrading of those rights. It's this dude's beach today, what about a website that I suddenly charge for tomorrow? Or hey, lets be realistic here, what about my future beach when that aforementioned website makes me my billions :)
I agree with you generally about property rights and "rich"people, though I'm not sure, based on this thread, if you know what is actually happening in this particular case. In California, you can't use private property to prevent people from reaching the ocean past the median tide line, which is public land by the state constitution.
Every bit of this was in place and well understood when Khosla purchased this land. The easement already existed. This isn't as situation where the government is coming in and seizing someone's private land, it's simply enforcing the easement that has existed for the last 100 years.
I apologize if you are aware of all this and are making a narrower point, that property rights shouldn't stop mattering because the person who owns it falls within the category of "rich people". However, there are all kinds of land use laws (another is "freedom to roam"[1]) that predate and preclude certain types of ownership. In other words, you can own property, and you have broad rights to do "what [you] want with it", but if you purchased it under conditions that were reasonably knowable at the time you made the purchase, it doesn't make sense to complain about it later.
Lastly, yeah, there is a problem here with rich. We're talking about a Silicon Valley billionaire showing up and denying access to a beach that the surrounding community had access to - as guaranteed by the California constitution - for the last 100 years. I'd say Khosla created his own popular perception of "rich" people in this case. It's the sort of thing were I can image other "rich" people cringing, like, dude, Americans still don't resent the wealthy, what are you doing here.
It's not the billionaire's beach. He has no legal right to the beach front which is guaranteed as public by California law. I don't think your second point is reflective of this situation and I think your first is only somewhat reflective of the formerly public road.
> I worked and paid for it, I should get to do what I want with it.
When it’s a house or a table or a bicycle shop, this approach makes sense and I agree with it.
When it’s land or natural resources, it is perfectly sensible to place some general restrictions on what people can do. Those pillars of our existence were here a million years before the current owner and will be there for millions of years afterwards. The entire society depends to a lesser or greater extent on land and natural resources. It is irresponsible for society to allow the owner to do anything they want with it.
Now that’s not to say that nothing should be allowed, but for instance the right of travel for people that don’t cause the place harm in doing so, espesially if it is to their homes, should really win over the right of any individual to close of access to a working road for a place they never even go to.
I don’t hold strong views on this case in particular, but I felt compelled to rebut the general idea that land and natural resources are ‘property just like any other’.
“Rich people” are quite rightly held to a higher standard in their actions because of their means. Vinod can go surf on any beach he wants, even if he can’t get wrongful exclusive access to this one, but his housekeeper who has equal right under the law is constrained by their means.
Some people may view it as a matter of right and wrong; that forcing a public accommodation onto a private citizen is unjust, even if they would benefit from it.
I say, forget what the previous owners thought. If the public needs a way to access some public land (the beach), build a public road. If the way is blocked by private land, that's what eminent domain is for. Seize some land and compensate Khosla. That's what would happen to regular people.
That's what was done before he bought the land though? An easement was placed on it allowing for people to pass through to the beach right? It's the same situation as having a sidewalk in front of your house.
No, the actual previous owners of the were running access to the beach as a business. It was a road (driveway) they built and charged fees to use, not public.
Living in a state that respects property rights has benefits. When you know that your state respects other individuals' property rights, you know it's less likely that they will trample your rights as well.
The case hinges on the previous landowner performing "public dedication" of the road by letting people use it. The concept of "public dedication" without the previous owners of the land creating any legal documentation, and possibly unaware of the legal consequences, that they are willingly performing public dedication of the road is absurd.
I wish I could find the resource I read but common law paths and easements have existed for a long time and it's not absurd that long-standing tradition can reflect intent or legal obligation. Domestic marriage after a certain number of years is one example.
Note that there is no common law marriage in California.
The question of whether this dude's property rights do or ought to trump public access to the beach is a detailed point of law, and, I mean, clearly is not as black and white as some posters are making out (neither side trivially prevailed in a summary judgment through the courts). But this subthread is not whether the case was decided correctly on its merits, but whether people who think that Khosla should be able to fence access to the beach through his property are deluded idiots who wrongly imagine that they will someday own beaches themselves, and are agitating for this particular wholly imaginary self-interest, or whether they might have other reasons to believe as they do.
As other people suggested, they may see it as more likely that a state that allows someone to put a gate up on their property that leads to a public beach will allow them to put up a fence around their yard, or cut down a tree on their property, or demolish a building on their property that they do not want.
When you buy a house with an HOA, you agree that the HOA can say what you can and can’t do to your house. When you buy a property in California, you are agreeing to follow the laws regarding public property. Maybe not explicitly, but they’re laws nonetheless.
I can't speak for others, but I consider it a benefit to live under the rule of law — all law, which includes the U.S. Constitution (which makes itself and treaties the supreme law of the land), the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which protects land rights as they were prior the the Mexican-American War) as well as the California state constitution.
I think I benefit if the rules are explicit, well-written and apply to all players, without a 'we want to screw this rich guy' escape clause. I would also like it were it easier for everyone, not just a really magnificently rich guy, to defend his legal rights and privileges against the government.
I'll never have more than a rounding error of his wealth, but I may every well someday be the recipient of the same sort of bile that he's receiving, and I think that in that case I would benefit from a fair government and laws, rather than a howling mob.
The French Revolution is not a good example of good behaviour.
> I would also like it were it easier for everyone, not just a really magnificently rich guy, to defend his legal rights and privileges against the government.
The government is the reification of will of the people, including yourself. It acts out the will of the people, and the will of the people is that the beaches are everyone's property. Sometimes the government is right, sometimes wrong, and having processes to mitigate and remedy is important, however it's not some towering obelisk of Mordor smiting left and right.
Right. I'm never going to get arrested or be on trial (statistically), so why defend the civil rights of those accused? I'm much more likely to be a victim, so why vote against my own interests?
To be clear you are the victim in this case. It’s also in your interests as an individual to reduce incidence of crime and strict policing and minimum sentences don’t, prison reform does. That would in fact lead you to vote for whatever reduces the likelihood of your being victimized too, and that’s Scandinavian prisons and policing. You should vote for reduced recidivism and a functional rehabilitation system and not a punishment system that’s so utterly failed.
What does strict policing have to do with civil rights, like the right to face your accuser, the right to a jury trial, protections against double jeopardy, etc.?
My point being sometimes people vote or defend ideas that they believe are fundamentally right -- regardless of whether they themselves benefit from those ideas.
> What does strict policing have to do with civil rights, like the right to face your accuser, the right to a jury trial, protections against double jeopardy, etc.?
I'm suggesting that as someone who doesn't want crime to happen to them, this is the kind of thing you'd optimize for anyways. Jailing people in and of itself doesn't reduce crime, in fact, the US recidivism rate is so high, if you locked up innocent people and people guilty of low-level crimes you'd probably increase the crime rate. That's how ineffective America's police/prison industrial complex is at reducing crime. As such these procedures are something you'd want to keep people out of America's wildly ineffective prisons.
> My point being sometimes people vote or defend ideas that they believe are fundamentally right -- regardless of whether they themselves benefit from those ideas.
Sure. However, a rich man refusing to let the people of California onto their beach in support of exercising their constitutional rights isn't one of them.
I'm not saying rich to engender animosity against his wealth, he earned it, that's great. I'm pointing out how many other options he has. He could literally use his money to build his own synthetic ocean in the middle of California and put a beach house on that. Instead, he's chosen to spend his largesse to keep Californians from being able to exercise their constitutional rights so he can have a slightly better view. That's the definition of a dick move.
This is an uncharitable and condescending take, although it does follow a sadly pervasive rhetorical pattern.
Essentially it erases the question of whether this might be a case of protecting the fundamental rights of our society from erosion, and reduces the problem to the immediate material circumstances. With all of that difficult nuance and caution gone, anybody who disagrees with the foregone conclusion is just a poor and stupid rube.
Why do you consider it a fundamental right to be able to go on someone else's private property, even if it was allowed public usage in the past? Maybe CA should have passed some sort of beach front protection like Oregon did in 1967. Nobody can own the beach. It's all public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Beach_Bill
Would such a right entitle me to be able to camp out on your property? Back yard? Forest behind your backyard? Forest 10 miles away from the nearest dwelling?
This isn't a fictitious question either, because some countries do have such laws (with some level of exception for actual places of dwelling). At the core is the notion of being able to own something, which itself is something we feel is simple because of how common we engage in the act, but which philosophically is far more complicated to deal with than people give credit (even more so when one considers nature gives no sanctity to the body).
In general governments have 'good enough' laws that make enough people happy without getting to the real philosophical questions, but in doing so leave open edge cases which have unsatisfactory answers because the philosophy cannot be reconciled with the practice.
It's perfectly valid for you to argue in defense of that right, even that it trumps property rights if that's what you believe. What's not okay is to say that the people siding with the issue's other concerns are dumb greedy idiots who shoot themselves in the foot because they can't understand sharing.
Every person in the United States has had the right to access any beach in California for almost 50 years. To act like this case represents an "erosion of property rights" is disingenuous.
Next we'll be talking about "eroding the rights of people to buy the ocean".
Not exactly. There is a right to be on the beach up to the mean high tide line, (except government owned/controlled beaches), but there is no guarantee of access, which is the issue here, and in places like Malibu colony.
> Development shall not interfere with the public’s right of access to the sea where acquired through use or legislative authorization, including, but not limited to, the use of dry sand and rocky coastal beaches to the first line of terrestrial vegetation.
This is an access point that has been used by the public for decades.
The argument on the other side is that this is a matter of what's good for society in the long-term. For example, supporting a law that says "let's take all the money of class X and give it to the rest" would always be "in the interest" of the majority in the short term. That doesn't make it right.
A "public park" is simply owned by a public entity, it does not mean you get unlimited unrestricted access to it. If the city/county/state/fed decided to wall it off and not allow anyone in it, it would be their prerogative.
If I (a private individual/entity) owned a 60 acre flatland park, and one day decided not to allow people on my land, is that not my right as land owner?
If we allow a person to own the beach, then it is their property to disallow trespassers.
The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
> The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
Because people really want beaches, but aren't willing to pay taxes to buy back what is now private property. Fifth amendment says the gov't must pay for private property, and the California law is arguably un-constitutional. Just buy a path under eminent domain; problem solved. Honestly, this seems like an expression of resentment against a rich guy as much as anything, as evinced by others proposing to take boats to the beach and bang on drums.
>The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
Devil's advocate: why do we place such a high value on a "beach" vs any other kind of land? Is there something extra precious about where the water meets the land?
There's a lot less of it than non beach front land for one.
It also has pretty universal recreational purposes. People love to go to beaches and swim, sunbathe, picnic, surf, play volleyball, etc. I'm surprised it's utility is even being questioned, this is a very strong cultural norm.
You can sunbathe, picnic, and play volleyball on any other land. Surfing is relatively new, and swimming isn't unique to oceans.
>I'm surprised it's utility is even being questioned, this is a very strong cultural norm.
In a world where even the most fundamental cultural norms are being questioned and upended, you're surprised that someone asks why a beach is so much more important than other land?
Yes there is. Just look at the average property values of beach front property, riverfront property etc... There are other "special" types of land as well with additional value that governments have decided to regulate differently.
The answer is “tradition”. Shore access has been important to human civilization since before recorded history. Wars have been fought over shore access.
Not shoreline specifically, but commercially-viable shoreline. Ports, harbors, rivers, etc; places where you can move people and things to other places. Generic stretch of beach is not such a place.
Have you heard of anyone who has been unable to trade, travel, or transport because he could not use Vinod Khosla's beach as a loading dock, port, and harbor? Waterways have ports which are often publicly-owned or operated for commercial use.
> Is there something extra precious about where the water meets the land?
Absolutely. Maybe not tangibly precious, but anyone whose ever stood on a beach and looked out over the ocean knows that there's definitely something special about it.
There's a theory that we're hardwired to be drawn to shoreline, as accessing the resources of tidal zones would have been a definite competitive advantage for our ancestors.
Our natural obsession with tracking the moon also plays into this, as a way of predicting when tidal conditions are best to forage/fish/etc.
It's analogous to the theory where marathon hunting contributed to our physical endurance, brain power and predictive abilities, upright running, sweating, etc.
Both theories attempt to explain the general sense of pleasure we get from visiting the beach and long distance running, respectively.
The concept of prescriptive right-of-way depends on whether access was "taken" vs "licensed".
It's like squatters rights, but for a public right-of-way.
You can't claim squatters rights if you've been paying rent to the property owner the whole time.
In the same way, if the previous owner "licensed" access across his property, by charging fees for parking and/or entry, then no prescriptive right-of-way is/was ever established. It would be permissive right-of-way.
Since aquisition by prescription typically requires some element of abandonment, charging fees serves a double purpose: 1) proving the property is "in-use" / not abandoned, and 2) that the paying public recognized the private property rights of the owner. (Ie, that there was no public understanding or "expectation" that access across the private property should be free and/or unrestricted.)
Since legal consideration is required for a lawfully recognized contract, charging a fee makes this implied recognition of the property rights legally valid.
I see law the same way I see a computer program, and court as a computer.
The current legal code is never wrong in what it does. It simply executes and terminates. The courts define interpretation and execution semantics for it.
If you do not like the result, you've just failed at implementing the correct legal code.
It's futile to blame laws and court rulings. Caveat to some extent obviously, since laws and courts have informal specs, it does mean that two different court (in my analogy computers) could end up on slightly different results.
But most importantly we should focus on changing the legal code itself if we don't like the results.
If anything, the bigger issue with laws and courts is the cost of execution. Just to know what outcome the current legal code results in given a concrete situation takes years, lots of money, tons of appeal, etc. If we could make that much cheaper and quick, it would greatly improve things. Think development feedback cycles. Imagine it took you years to test your code on a few scenarios? That's what happens with legislation today.
So back to the article. It's not up to the courts to decide the desired behavior. It is only up to them to define the result of the currently described behavior. And it might seem in this case, the describe behavior maybe has a bug with regards to the desired behavior of some of the users...
In France, la Loi littoral guarantees public access to the shoreline, everywhere. Or at least it should since it's often compromised by private interests. But it's still quite good for anyone who likes the sea, ocean and coasts. I'd love France to also have a "right to roam" law like Norway.
Are there such laws in your country? How well is it enforced?
In most states no. It’s a feature not a bug. Property rights are considered sacred. Plenty of people don’t want the government telling them what to do on their property. It’s bad in this situation but good for owners in plenty of others.
Fort Walton county is one of 2 counties in Florida where the property owners own the beach to the high tide line. You’re allowed to walk on the beach around the water line but not setup on the beach. The Sheriff and county decided they want to change it and is now suing all the beach owners in Fort Walton (my wife’s family being one of them).
The Florida governor signed an emergency Bill that they couldn’t just take the land all of the sudden they had to go through the courts. The Sheriff’s office came out and said they would stop issuing or enforcing trespassing on the beach and lesson beach patrols.
The home owners legally own the beach. The county officials want to take it from them without paying anything and change the uniqueness of the county that drew home owners in the first place.
I can see both sides but the county government and Sheriff can’t just decide one day they want to take property. No vote or anything just we want to take it.
My family owns a condo in the next county over. It’s a lot more noisy and I can see why home owners were draw to Fort Walton in the first place.
> Plenty of people don’t want the government telling them what to do on their property.
Sure if we pretend libertarianism exists as a functional concept. Can you build an enrichment facility on your property? No. Can you dump toxic chemicals into your well? Nope! Can you fly drones at 30K feet? Nah. Can you brew up a batch of grandma’s finest crystal meth? No siree bob. So yeah, you accept plenty of encroachment. The sanctity of your property is an arbitrary line you’re drawing to exclude campers, sunbathers and randos off on a hike. That’s sure to teach somebody... something...
You're actually kind of making my point here. You're accepting the governments intrusion (defining what can and can't be done on "your" tract of land via zoning and law). And that's my point. Once you accept that it's a question of where you draw the line -- you're debating shades of grey and not moral black and white.
Spain is the same. There are some loopholes, like limiting land access with an "eco tax", but that's useless against boats. I watched recently on tv a program attacking "party boats" that took a lot of young people, many of them Brits on holydays, to a closed beach frequented by Hollywood celebs, with all-you-can-drink included.
Unpopular opinion but I'm kinda on his side on this one. It's a liability issue.
If you open a "public access road" through your property, and there's a pothole that damages someone's vehicle, you can get sued. If you don't put up fences at the cliffs and some dumbass drives off the edge, you can get sued. If someone decides to camp at the edge of the road and a tree falls on them, you can get sued.
Anything that happens to people on your property is automagically your fault in the US. Allowing the public onto your property, especially when you're not making any money off of it (so you could, you know, pay for insurance like the previous owners definitely did) is a terrible idea.
> Anything that happens to people on your property is automagically your fault in the US.
That's not true. California has a Recreational Use Statute (Civil Code Section 846) which makes private landowners immune from liability for people who enter their land, as long as they don't charge a fee. Most states have similar laws.
Time to find out the exact borders of what is considered "his" beach and crowd the ever living shit out of it, just outside of what could be considered "his". "I'm not touching you!"
Under the California Coastal Act, everything below the mean high tide line is public. But that's not the issue here; the issue is getting access to this beach.
So you could bring in house boats and floating docks. This is common in some regions. I am not sure if the coast guard would have any say in it though.
How bright of dance / disco lights are you allowed to have on a house boat?
That’s awesome! I was thinking a little more nefariously though about one that would inspire people to collaborate and visit “his” area and perhaps “celebrate” with drums
He doesn't live there - has never lived there - and has said he will never live there. He's just completing the lawsuit "for the principle" of it which is as insane as it sounds.
It would be ironic if a mega billionaire bought the land surrounding his land and worked with the county to route the road around that surrounding property.
Could one not walk up to this beach by foot following the road built? I ask this because the article said the previous owner charged for parking not access. If so I don't agree with the judges assessment because that would mean anyone from the public could just walk to this beach and use it as they are arguing it has always been open to the public which seems true to me from what I've read.
If this irritates you then you should also read about how Larry Ellison owns 80% of a Hawaiin island. I can envision the world's prettiest places eventually closed to the public and existing for the sole enjoyment of billionaires and their future generations.
In my country, no one can buy land up to 4 meters (13 feet) away the sea, rivers and lakes because it is a public domain. Because of this, tourists from other countries like to come here and enjoy every beach...
Maybe someone ought to make a nice business out of this. Ferry interested parties to this exclusive public beach as part of an interesting tour about history and minutiae of treaty and law.
Few people are this small. The dude is pretty old (64 years). He'll probably only be able to live on his own for 10-15 more years. The beach will be open again when someone else buys the property.
1. My understanding is that the issue is getting to the beach, not being on the beach itself. Everything below the mean high tide line is public, but all routes to the public area pass over private land and in Khosla's case he's having success arguing that there is no easement.
But that only applies to routes over land, right? I wonder why no one has started some kind of shuttle service that runs boats from a place the public can reach by land to Khosla's beach?
Charge people $15-20 for the trip, and also offer snack and drink and suntan lotion sales, beach umbrella and beach chair rental and other things like that.
2. I haven't really been following this case, but I recall that at one point he was making an argument based on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was the treaty between the US and Mexico that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. I haven't seen any mention of this aspect of the case in quite a while--was it dropped?
It was this treaty that gave the US ownership of California (and much of the rest of what is now the western US). Part of this treaty was a guarantee that the US would honor existing property rights of people in those territories that were switching ownership from Mexico to the United States.
The argument went something like this, I believe. Under Mexican law, private ownership of beaches was allowed, and many California beaches were private. When California became a US territory, those beaches remained private under the Treaty. When Calfornia became a state a couple years later, in 1850, its Constitutional provisions making beaches public did not apply to beaches covered by the Treaty.
This seems like sound reasoning up to that point, at least in the case where the beach was still owned in 1850 by the same person who owned it when the Treaty was ratified.
Where it gets iffy is dealing with changes of ownership. Usually in the case of real property you can convey all your rights to the next owner. You can probably make a decent case that this means that if one of those original owners sold their private beach to a third party, or passed it on via inheritance, it should stay private, because the right to convey such ownership was one of the property rights they had when it was part of Mexico, so should be covered by the Treaty.
But what about the conveyances one step beyond that? Two steps beyond? Surely the intent of the Treaty was not to forever make Mexican property rules apply in former Mexican parts of the US. It was to provide a fair transition so that the current owners would not lose out as those territories transitioned from Mexican rules to US rules.
I'd expect most beach property to have changed hands enough times since 1848 that it should be considered fully transitioned to US rules, and California law would fully apply.
Basically a panel found in favor of an earlier Judge's ruling that because the previous owners charged a fee to enter the property, it isn't a public road/beach, but instead a permitted use road/beach, giving the owner the right to not permit ANYone to enter the property.
If you use ublock origin, blocking javascript breaks bloomberg's paywall. You can do that for bloomberg.com (and nothing else) by opening the site, clicking the ublock icon, and clicking the bottom at the far bottom right.
Alternatively, using just Firefox: stop (X) the page loading after the content has loaded but before the giant JavaScript bundle has downloaded, and then enter reader mode.
Is it so preposterous? Let the rich dude have his slice of private beach.
It's not very caring to the rich guy. It's not like there's no other substitutes people could use to get their beach fill. But for him, it's right there. Come on, where's your empathy for the guy?
A recruiter recently emailed me about a startup whose “Series A was backed by Khosla” like it was a good thing! I actually replied to him that this is a show stopper to me. Few years ago I did not join Theranos after looking at their board.
Do the “right” thing - especially here in the valley, if you work in tech you have a lot of choices
> Few years ago I did not join Theranos after looking at their board.
Based on your track record, I fully expect an update to come out where it turns out this Khosla guy's 89 acre property doesn't actually exist, it was actually 8.9 acres magnified with an extremely elaborate mechanism of smoke and mirrors.
My brother applied for jobs at Theranos several times--he was in the biomedical engineering area--but somehow it never worked out (once they apparently lost his application, another time they cancelled an interview at the last minute, etc.).
A screenshot. If something is posted here and HN expect people to have a constructive discussion about its content, then that resource should be free to read or HN doesn't really want people to actually discuss the content of the source. HN can't have it both ways.
Bloomberg also wants to have it both ways, they want their content to be referenced on Google, and a select number of people to share the articles they read for free, while disallowing others to do the exact same thing. Fortunately no nobody can prevents people from screenshooting and sharing the screenshot for free instead of the article directly.
I think that the level of discourse in threads on paywalled articles is frequently disappointingly low. I think there should be a rule against articles on paywall.
Nowhere else in the world other than California could Khosla have amassed the wealth he has in the way that he did. You'd think at some point he'd want to "give back", but I guess sociopaths gonna sociopath.
dude... that dude is 64?!?!?! he looks like he's 84. dude must of had a tough life.
while it sucks that he wants to restrict access, i can see where he is coming from if this was a private beach to begin with and the original owner allowed the public to use it. it also says in the article that the original owner would charge for parking so that strengthens his case.
can't hate on a dude from wanting to do with what is rightfully his.
There are no private beaches in CA by law. He owns the only road leading to it, which the previous owner allowed people to drive through for a small fee for many years.
I know many of you are dismayed, but there is a silver lining of ecological benefits. Studies show that relatively inaccessible beaches and wilderness (whether public or private) have healthier ecosystems and less litter.
For example, even mere regular trampling of sandy beaches impacts the food chain:
The legal fees Vinod is paying are far greater than what he'd have to pay to maintain rightful public access. He likely didn't understand the access issue at the time of purchase (since he's never actually there!) and so this protracted argument was the only way for him to derive value from his purchase.
https://sf.curbed.com/2017/10/5/16431150/martins-beach-san-m...
https://www.surfrider.org/pages/timeline-open-martins-beach