Can someone explain the perpetuity thing with the land?

Right now, Matt King controls what is done with the property as he is the Trustee for the Trust. However, the beneficiaries may have some rights to fight, but that would be expensive to do. If the Trust is dissolved because of the RAP, then each and every beneficiary (i.e. each cousin/relative) because a 'joint tenant' and gets a certain portion interest in the land. So for example, Cousin A gets 1/52 interest, Cousin B gets 1/52 interest, etc.

It becomes a nightmare because no one person can sell the entirety of land, they can only sell their small interest and no developer would want only a small interest, they'd want the whole thing. So the developer would have to go to all 52 cousins and convince them to sell their interest. And no one would really want to go first, they'd all want to go last because the last person, the "hold out," would get the biggest offer. Or the developer would have to get all 52 in one place to all agree at the same time to sell to him.

Now there are also ways to legally divide the land into the interests, but that too is difficult, likely impossible unless one or a very small group control the majority of interests.

So Matt's solutions primarily come down to either potentially donating or selling the land to the State, which some cousins might fight him on because the land is worth a lot more than I bet the state could pay, or trying to raise the money to buy out the cousins. Maybe he could get enough of the 'keep the land' cousins to pool their money to buy out the 'sell out' cousins.

I just wasn't sure Matt's feelings were 100% "pro Hawaii", it seemed that at least part of the reason he didn't want to sell was because he didn't want the real estate agent to get rich.

As I understood it (which, granted, is based on filling in some blanks, as they don't exactly go into a lot of detail), it doesn't reflect on his legal acumen.

My understanding was that the trust they're talking about was set up long, long before Matt King was even born, which I think lets him off the hook on that score.

It isn't at all unusual in well-prepared trusts (indeed, I think it's pretty standard) to include a "perpetuities savings clause." The problem the drafter is trying to solve is that if a trust - looking at it from the start - might possibly stay in existence too long, then it's invalid altogether. The solution is to include a provision that says that, no matter what else happens, the trust will terminate (and the corpus will be distributed) not later than [some savings event]. A common savings event might be, for example, 21 years after the death of longest-living descendant of Joseph Kennedy who is alive when the trust is created. People do (or did, anyway) actually use the Kennedies sometimes, rather than their own descendants, just because they figured there were a lot of them (though experience has proved them to have a disturbing tendency to be short-lived).

Anyway - though the exact details aren't explained (because that would be about as boring as this post, if for no other reason) - my guess was that the relevant trust was about to have its savings clause become operative, thanks to the death of some "measuring life" about 14 years before the movie's time frame.

Nuts berry, he is not a stupid lawyer, and he didn't create the trust. The rule against perpetuities is a very old property rule we inherited from English law. It is a restriction on the way you can transfer property. The person transferring the property can decide to give it with conditions, for example, to his/her spouse for life then to their eldest child for life then to the eldest grandchild, etc. Theoretically, the transfer or could decide to whom the property goes for several generations or even centuries, but the rule against perpetuities prevents that placing a limit. The suggestion in this film is that such limit has been reached, so that the property had to be definitively given to somebody.

I could look this up, and will, but now this makes me wonder how Wrigley pulled off the Catalina deal even more...

I'm happy Catalina isn't developed. I don't live there, so perhaps I would feel differently.

But I am a California native.

What's happened to this state in the past...just the past thirty years is horrible.

That's what I was old enough to notice.

I understand change is healthy and progress is good.

But the unbroken sameness of the planned communities, malls with their anchor stores, mini malls, and "light" industry parks that remain 1/2 unused...

We have truly paved over Paradise.
What's more, we keep using more and more water to wash down our parking lots.

And...instead of re-gentrifying our older communities, putting money back into those areas, we just move twenty miles up the way and start fresh.

I'll stop.