The 1823 Supreme Court applied colonial international law to Indigenous land title

Evidence

Johnson v. McIntosh is one of the most important cases ruled on by the United States Supreme Court. Decided in 1823, the Court adopted the international law of colonialism, called today the Doctrine of Discovery, to be the controlling legal precedent on whether American Indian nations owned the absolute title, or the fee simple title, to their lands and thereby possessed the property right to sell land to whomever they wished for whatever amount they could negotiate. — Robert J. Miller, Review of Buying America from the…, 14

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names and dates the case and the Doctrine of Discovery that supplies the controlling legal rule.
• XREF: Connects to the Doctrine of Discovery material in the colonial-imperial reading cluster (A Mission to Civilize, Along the Archival Grain): law as the instrument that manufactures plunderable categories.