Watching an episode of Las Vegas where an ex-con claims to have won, in a card game from Bugsy Siegel 50 years ago, title to a a block of land at the center of the Montecito, and he has a lawyer, etc. The Montecito’s lawyers talk about how long they can keep this tied up in court until the old man dies, but nobody mentions that the Montecito almost certainly has been continuously occupying the land under claim of right and color of title for a sufficient period that it can file an action to quiet title by adverse possession (a/k/a “squatter’s rights”), and win. I flashed on an old Cheers episode where the bar’s evil neighbor has an old deed showing his property line extends into the bar, Sam has a law student look at it and he sees no objection – we get adverse possession in basic real-property law, in the first year of law school. This ancient-land-claim thing seems to drive a lot of plots in popular drama and the most basic objection is never raised. Why is that?!
Because it makes for an entertaining story? There’s very little realistic about the show Las Vegas (and, to be fair, it doesn’t exactly portray itself as a hard-hitting documentary).
It might be interesting to find some TV shows or movies that got real estate law right. IANAL, but I think that The Castle basically got the law (Australian law in this case) right. American lawyers might want to watch it to compare with eminent domain in the U.S.
Forgive my ignorance, but did Bugsy Siegel own the Montecito? If so, I’m not sure they can claim to have occupied the land under claim of right. That requires the squatter to genuinely believe he’s entitled to be there, doesn’t it? (I haven’t touched this stuff since first year, so I’m probably rusty). And if the owners of the casino knew that the land had been lost in a card game, they couldn’t believe they had the right to own and possess that land.
Of course, if Siegel sold the contested parcel to the Montecito’s owners, without advising them that another held a claim on that land, then they’ve got the claim of right/color of title. I just don’t know the Siegel/Montecito relationship, and Wikipedia isn’t helping here.
The plot was that Siegel once did hold the deed to the land at the center of the Montecito, but this was the first they ever heard of anyone else having a claim to it. The chain of title from Siegel to the present owners was not discussed.
I’ve got a theory (which I’ve mentioned on this Board before, and which I admit is thoroughly unsupported) that the appearance of similar plot items in different shows might be due to script-writing class assignments.
People in screenwriting courses get stuck with an assignment in which one particularly odd situation drives the plot, and they’re supposed to show how characters react to this, each in their own appropriate character.
Years later, stuck with a gap in the show’s schedule, they have to come up with a plot in a hurry. So they fall back on the old assignment, rewriting it to fit their show, or adapting an idea they heard about before.
This seemed to explain, for instance, all the shows about tax audits I saw in the 1960s, and why I haven’t seen them since. So my theory is that, ten or twenty years ago someone running a screenwriting course stumbled across the idea of Old Land Claims as a plot motivator, and neither knew or cared about the legal realities, but it made a nifty class assignment. And now we’re living with the fallout of it.
Las Vegas was entirely silly. By way of a cite, I point out that they showed Molly Sims in a bikini every episode, when Vanessa Marcil was right there being a goddess. Blind fools!
The above post has no purpose but to show the skin shot of Marcil. Well, and Sims too, I 'spose. If you like her and her bland face. Which seems weird to me but whatever.