Notre Dame Law School NDLScholarship Journal Articles Publications 1980 At the Whim of the Sovereign: Aboriginal Title Reconsidered Nell Jessup Newton Notre Dame Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship Part of the Indian and Aboriginal Law Commons Recommended Citation Nell J. Newton, At the Whim of the Sovereign: Aboriginal Title Reconsidered, 31 HASTINGS L.J. 1215 (1980). Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1199 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. At the Whim of the Sovereign: Aboriginal Title Reconsidered By NELL JESSUP NEWTON* In 1947, Professor Felix Cohen, then Associate Solicitor for the United States Department of the Interior and a recognized scholar in American Indian law, wrote that despite what "[e]very American schoolboy is taught . the historic fact is that practically all of the real estate acquired by the United States since 1776 was purchased not from Napoleon or any other emperor or czar but from its original In- dian owners."' Only eight years later, Justice Reed, writing for the ma- jority of the United States Supreme Court in Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States,2 asserted a ontrary view: "Every American schoolboy knows that the savage tribes of this continent were deprived of their ancestral ranges by force and that, even when the Indians ceded mil- lions of acres by treaty.