February 28, 1823
US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, in the case of Johnson v. M’Intosh, first applied the Doctrine of Discovery and the Law of Nations in the United States. Marshall traced the outlines of the “discovery doctrine”—that a European power gains radical title (also known as sovereignty) to the land it discovers. As a corollary, the discovering power gains the exclusive right to extinguish the “right of occupancy” of the indigenous occupants, which otherwise survived the assumption of sovereignty. Marshall further opined that when they declared independence from Great Britain, the United States government inherited the British right of preemption over Native American lands.
