1. Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power.
- Author
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Park, K-Sue
- Subjects
Right of property -- Laws, regulations and rules -- History -- Research ,Jurisdiction, Territorial -- Laws, regulations and rules -- History -- Research ,Acquisition of territory -- Laws, regulations and rules -- History -- Research ,Sovereignty -- Laws, regulations and rules -- History -- Research ,Land titles -- Registration and transfer ,Government regulation - Abstract
ARTICLE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1490 I. CREATING PROPERTY, REGISTRIES, AND JURISDICTIONS IN THE 1499 COLONIES A. The Invention of the American Title Registry 1503 B. The Registry as a Tool for [...], 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 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 U.S. 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 U.S. sovereign title to Native homelands. This Article presents new questions about how the legal infrastructure of property furthered European colonists' conquest and how this progression of conquest on the ground produced the national jurisdiction and real-estate market of today. Leveraging established scholarship on the colonies and deploying original research on county creation, it shows that in the haphazard history culminating in the American title registry, colonists borrowed the English legal forms of the registry and county and remade them into local tools of colonial territorial expansion. The registry and county became key local governmental forms that drew settlers into Native nations' territories and encouraged them to claim lands by reassuring those settlers that their claims would become real property. The time map of county creation--not of the formation of territories, nor the admission of states, nor the conclusion of treaties--most accurately tracks where the United States grew its jurisdictional power, and when. The United States created counties and registries between its plans to invade and its actual ability to govern lands, before the naming of transitional territories, and often even before obtaining Native cessions to the lands by treaty. In the history of conquest, county creation thus lies in the transition between mere white entitlement and actual title. And as a consequence of this history, counties came to underpin the national jurisdiction, and the local institution of the registry became the common and continuous infrastructure for the entire national real-estate market. This Article's history of the title registry underscores the conceptual and practical stakes of redressing the erasure of race from our understanding of legal institutions and development. In particular, this history challenges us to recognize less obvious ways that the legacies of conquest and enslavement survive to structure our landscape and lives. Race works to shape law and legal outcomes in ways that many now recognize, such as by excluding people from institutional protections and benefits and through the predatory risks of formal inclusion. But the registry's history also illustrates a third phenomenon: the phenomenon of legal innovation spurred by white settlers' willingness to view racial violence as an economic resource, which introduced new institutions and practices that may appear to be facially "race-neutral" but promote the production of property value through the dehumanizing logic of race. Colonists constructed minimalist registries, which did not authenticate title claims and encouraged their proliferation. In this way, they prioritized the collective goal of building jurisdictional power at the direct expense of Native and Black communities whose lands and people colonists rapaciously claimed as property for that ever-growing market. The result was an institution that continues to privilege the production of property value above all--above protecting individual property interests, and above sustaining homes, communities, and life, in ways that now affect us all.
- Published
- 2024