Abstract
At the root of most land titles in America outside the original thirteen colonies sits a federal patent. The validity of government title, in turn, rests on “[t]he great case ofJohnson v. M'Intosh,” which held that a discovering sovereign has the exclusive right to extinguish Indians' interests in their lands, either by purchase or just war. Yet both legal and historical scholarship on this “great case” is surprisingly thin. There are no studies examining the litigants or the actual acreage under dispute (surprising for a real property dispute). There are also a number of unanswered legal questions surrounding Chief Justice Marshall's opinion inM'Intosh, perhaps none more glaring than the failure to pin down the legal basis for the decision. This article endeavors to fill in these gaps.
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