The transformation in prevailing conceptualizations of property and the drive to render land as fungible as possible, the desire to commoditize land that had been pursued in earnest since the seventeenth century in England, was realized in the space of the settler colony decades before it would be implemented in the United Kingdom. The author explores how the commodity logic of abstraction that subtended new property logics during this time, reflected in the Torrens system of title by registration, was accompanied by a racial logic of abstraction that rendered the land of the Native, or Savage vacant and ripe for appropriation. By way of conclusion, the author speculates on the ways in which the imposition of English property law in the settler colony influenced the development of modern property law in England.

Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations-notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid-play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.

The process of cartography and the ideological problems that accompany this process has taken on new significance in the digital age with the proliferation of digital maps and geographic information systems such as Google Earth. This study begins by analyzing the history of digital mapping and its connection to an indexical, ontological reality. I demonstrate how Google Earth, by incorporating a social network that engages users as embodied interactors rather than disembodied voyeurs, is able to present user-generated content and dialog spatially on the very object that such content critiques. Ultimately, this study argues for ways that users can recontextualize and subvert ‘master representations’ of visual media within the authorial structure rather than re-authoring the existing software and structures.

Issues regarding race and racial identity as well as questions pertaining to property rights and ownership have been prominent in much public discourse in the United States. In this article, Professor Harris contributes to this discussion by positing that racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts. Professor Harris examines how whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law. Professor Harris traces the origins of whiteness as property in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights. Following the period of slavery and conquest, whiteness became the basis of racialized privilege - a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public in character. These arrangements were ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property. Even as legal segregation was overturned, whiteness as property continued to serve as a barrier to effective change as the system of racial classification operated to protect entrenched power. Next, Professor Harris examines how the concept of whiteness as property persists in current perceptions of racial identity, in the law's misperception of group identity and in the Court's reasoning and decisions in the arena of affirmative action. Professor Harris concludes by arguing that distortions in affirmative action doctrine can only be addressed by confronting and exposing the property interest in whiteness and by acknowledging the distributive justification and function of affirmative action as central to that task.

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.

Indigenous peoples interrupt commodity flows by asserting jurisdiction and sovereignty over their lands and resources in places that form choke points to the circulation of capital. In today’s economy, the state has begun to redefine its “resilience” in terms of its relative success in the protection and expansion of critical infrastructure. We find that there has been a political re-organization of governing authority over Indigenous peoples in Canada as a result, which is driven by greater integration of the private sector as national security “partners.” The securitization of “critical infrastructure”—essentially, supply chains of capital, such as private pipelines and public transport routes—has become the priority in mitigating the potential threat of Indigenous jurisdiction. New political and socio-temporal imperatives have led to shifts in risk evaluation, management, and mitigation practices of state administration, in cooperation with the private sector, to neutralize Indigenous disruption to supply chain infrastructure. In this paper, we examine two forms of risk mitigation: first, the configuration of Indigenous jurisdiction as a “legal risk” by the Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada; and second, the configuration of Indigenous jurisdiction as a source of potential “emergency.” Built on the literal ground of historical patterns of land grabs and migration, logistical space configures new networks of infrastructure into circuitries of production that cast into vivid relief the imperfections of settler sovereignty and the vital systems of Indigenous law.