Land and Law in California: Essays on Land Policies

(Probably this should really be 3.5 stars) I am interested in the settling of California after the Americans took over, particularly the long battle for confirmation of the Mexican and Spanish land grants. This book addresses that era in detail, plus a lot more--school and university lands, overflowed lands, preemption laws, etc. Most everyone was running some type of scam or fraud, piled two and three deep, buying politicians and judges, thus it was difficult to sort out the legitimate land owners. You would think that by 1850 the American government would have figured out how to go about carving up new territory, but that was clearly not the case.The first half of the book deals with the Spanish/Mexican land grants. The author has an agenda here, to dissuade the reader from believing that the system set up by Congress for confirming prior land grants was the major cause of the decades-long turmoil, as had been the general position of historians in more contemporary works (e.g. H. H. Bancroft). Probably he is about half-right in this argument, but he even manages to regularly contradict himself, at one point downplaying the cost of lawyers and at another point describing it as crippling. It is OK that he holds this revisionist position, but as I wrote, he is only partially successful in defending it.A bit more of a problem is that he regularly introduces terms and concepts without really defining them, as if the book is intended to be read by people already well versed in the topic. I am sort-of versed, so could figure it out, but it made it unnecessarily cumbersome and would surely put off people who have not studied this area of history. But then again, probably most people considering this book are not tyros. What little expertise I have is invested in the ranchos of southern Alameda County, and the author barely touches on these, and when he does, it was somewhat satisfying that I clearly knew more about them than he did!