Legal dispute involving the Rancho El Sobrante, a 20,565-acre Mexican land grant in present day Contra Costa County, California given in 1841 by Governor Juan Alvarado to Juan Jose Castro and Victor Castro. The name means "left over " in Spanish—the grant's boundaries were determined by the boundaries of the surrounding grants: San Antonio, San Pablo, El Pinole, La Boca de la Cañada del Pinole, Acalanes, and La Laguna de los Palos Colorados. This grant included the area between present day El Sobrante and Orinda. The sobrante grant presented a complicated case of land ownership when it came into the U.S. courts. By 1893, a survey map shows Victor Castro (Juan Jose had died) as the owner of just 549 acres. Thousands of acres had gone to pay attorneys' fees in long struggles in the courts, against both more or less legitimate claimants and plagues of squatters who tried to profit from the Castros' troubles. More lawsuits were filed until 1909, when the final partition decree settled legal ownership of the land within Rancho El Sobrante. OCLC/WorldCat lists only three copies: UCLA, UC Berkeley, and at Harvard.