Judith Younger has published her talk “Across Curricular Boundaries: Searching for a Confluence between Marital Agreements and Indian Land Transactions” in the Journal of Law & Inequality. Here is an excerpt:

Students view Johnson v. McIntosh with a jaundiced eye. To them, it is a case of Indians against Europeans. I point out that there were no Indian parties to the litigation, just two groups of European land speculators. I also point out that the Indians did well in this particular trade; they sold and got paid for the same land twice. The students are unmoved. “The Indians were here first,” they say. “Justice thus demands a decision for plaintiffs who claim through them.” “What about the fact that the land purchases were clearly illegal?” I ask. The students reject that too. They say the Europeans “owned” the legal system; it was skewed against the Indians. They tell me–as if I did not know it–that now the Indians have lost all but a tiny fraction of their original lands and that their efforts to regain those lands are a continual source of tension in our society.