ABSTRACT
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 US property system today. Prior scholars have focused exclusively on the registry’s role in catalyzing property markets, while mostly overlooking the main sources of this property in the American colonies: expropriated lands and enslaved people. This analysis centers the registry’s work of organizing and ‘proving’ land claims that were not only individual but collective, to affirm encroachments on tribal nations’ lands. In this way, registries helped scaffold the colonies’ tenuous but growing political and jurisdictional power. The specific history of the US title registry illustrates a crucial dynamic between property and sovereignty. In America, property and property institutions did not issue from sovereigns with established authority to govern a territory, as in the understanding drawn from European legal traditions. Rather, property institutions, exemplified by the title registry, preceded and ushered in colonial and US sovereign title to Native homelands …
K-Sue Park, Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries and Jurisdictional Power, 133 Yale Law Journal 1487 (March 2024).
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