In 1855, after the sale in respect to which the test case was made,
the Council of the city passed "the Van Ness Ordinance," so called
from the name of its author, the object of which was to settle and
quiet, as far as practicable, the title of persons occupying land in
the city. It relinquished and granted the right and interest of the
city to lands within its corporate limits, as defined by the charter
of 1851, with certain exceptions, to parties in the actual possession
thereof, by themselves or tenants, on or before the first of January,
1855, if the possession were continued to the time of the introduction
of the ordinance into the Common Council in June of that year; or,
if interrupted by an intruder or trespasser, it had been or might be
recovered by legal process. And it declared that, for the purposes of
the act, all persons should be deemed in possession who held titles
to land within the limits mentioned, by virtue of a grant made by the
authorities of the pueblo, including alcaldes among them, before the
7th of July, 1846,--the day when the jurisdiction over the country
is deemed to have passed from Mexico to the United States,--or
by virtue of a grant subsequently made by those authorities, if the
grant, or a material portion of it, had been entered in a proper book
of record deposited in the office or custody of the recorder of the
county of San Francisco on or before April 3d, 1850. This ordinance
was approved by an act of the Legislature of the State in March, 1858,
and the benefit of it and of the confirmatory act was claimed by the
defendant in the test case.

That case was most elaborately argued by able and learned counsel. The
whole law of Mexico respecting _pueblos_, their powers, rights, and
property, and whether, if possessing property, it was subject to
forced sale, the effect upon such land of the change of sovereignty to
the United States, the powers of alcaldes in disposing of the property