In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall handed down a Supreme Court decision of monumental importance in defining the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the English-speaking world. At the heart of the decision for Johnson v. M'Intosh was a "discovery doctrine" that gave rights of ownership to the European sovereigns who "discovered" the land and converted the indigenous owners into tenants. Though its meaning and intention has been fiercely disputed, more than 175 years later, this doctrine remains the law of the land. In 1991, while investigating the discovery doctrine's historical origins Lindsay Robertson made a startling find; in the basement of a Pennsylvania furniture-maker, he discovered a trunk with the complete corporate records of the Illinois and Wabash Land Companies, the plaintiffs in Johnson v. M'Intosh. Conquest by Law provides, for the first time, the complete and troubling account of the European "discovery" of the Americas. This is a gripping tale of political collusion, detailing how a spurious claim gave rise to a doctrine--intended to be of limited application--which itself gave rise to a massive displacement of persons and the creation of a law that governs indigenous people and their lands to this day.

An investigation into the legal basis of land claims in the United States, this volume uses the archives of the Illinois and Wabash Land Companies to illustrate how a doctrine that discovery created a right of ownership became enshrined in U.S. law & turned indigenous peoples from owners into tenants.

Exploring the history of contemporary legal thought on the rights and status of the West's colonized indigenous tribal peoples, Williams here traces the development of the themes that justified and impelled Spanish, English, and American conquests of the New World.

In Conquest and the Law in Swedish Livonia (ca. 1630-1710), Heikki Pihlajamäki offers an exciting account of the law in seventeenth-century Livonia, conquered by Sweden. The volume demonstrates how the differences in legal cultures affected the Livonian judiciary and legal procedure in the region.

The global expansion of European colonization is commonly perceived as lawful according to the valid European colonial law of the time. This book is substantially challenging this belief by uncovering its legal justifications based on discovery and terra nullius as retrospectively created legal fictions and demonstrating it ́s untenability in practice. Focused on the critical reconstruction of Spanish and Dutch colonization practices in northeastern South America, Trinidad and Tobago between 1498 and 1817, the book offers an illuminating view on the European shadow of the colonial past in the Americas. Based on the application of an innovative comparative spatio-legal Global History approach to 1,770 excavated European colonial written sources from archives of both sides of the Atlantic in comparison to the colonial legal provisions of Europe ́s most influential legal writers, the book, moreover, provides a substantial argument to the contemporary Caribbean-European reparation debate in favor of the return of Indigenous Peoples ́ historical territories. Therefore, the book calls for the extension of the traditional territory approach to reparations of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIPs) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR).

This is an enquiry into the place of the right of conquest in international relations since the early sixteenth century, and the causes and consequences of its demise in the twentieth century. It was a recognized principle of international law until the early years of this century that a state that emerges victorious in a war is entitled to claim sovereignty over territory which it has taken possession. Sharon Korman shows how the First World War - which led to the rise of self-determination and to calls for the prohibition of way - prompted the reconstruction of international law and the consequent abolition of the title by conquest. Her conclusion, which highlights the merits and defects of the modern law as a vehicle for discouraging war by denying the title to the conqueror, challenges many of the assumptions that have come to constitute part of the conventional wisdom of our times. This is a study, not of international law narrowly conceived, but of the place of a changing legal principle in international history and the contemporary world.