Long-sustained injustice becomes unquestionable law through entrenched property interests.

Evidence

However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest [a claimed right of domination] may appear; if the [pretended] principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it [the pretension] becomes the law of the land and cannot be questioned. emphasis added At 21 U. — Doctrine of Discovery Project, The Marshall Trilogy, 50

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Marshall concedes the doctrine may be ‘extravagant’ and still declares it beyond judicial questioning because so much property now rests on it — a self-aware account of how injustice converts into unquestionable law.
• APHORISMS: A durable rule for reading any legal or institutional order: origin determines nothing, settled reliance determines everything.