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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Property And Sovereignty In America: A History Of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, K-Sue Park
Property And Sovereignty In America: A History Of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article tells an untold history of the American title registry—a colonial bureaucratic innovation that, though overlooked and understudied, constitutes one of the most fundamental elements of the U.S. property system today. Prior scholars have focused exclusively on its role in catalyzing property markets, while mostly ignoring their main sources in the colonies -- expropriated lands and enslaved people. This analysis centers the institution’s work of organizing and “proving” claims that were not only individual but collective, to affirm encroachments on tribal nations’ lands and scaffold colonies’ tenuous but growing political, jurisdictional power. In other words, American property and property …
The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park
The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely …
Conquest And Slavery In The Property Law Course: Notes For Teachers, K-Sue Park
Conquest And Slavery In The Property Law Course: Notes For Teachers, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This piece contains ideas for teaching about the foundational place of the histories of conquest and slavery to American property law and the property law course. I begin by briefly reviewing how these topics have been erased and marginalized from the study of American property law, as mentioned by casebooks in the field published from the late nineteenth century to the present. I then show how the history of conquest constituted the context in which the singular American land system and traditional theories of acquisition developed, before turning to the history of the American slave trade and the long history …