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A land patent is a form of letters patent assigning official ownership of a particular tract of land that has gone through various legally-prescribed processes like surveying and documentation, followed by the letter's signing, sealing, and publishing in public records, made by a sovereign entity. While land patents are still issued by governments to indicate property is privately held, [1] they are also often used by sovereign citizens and similar groups in illegitimate attempts to gain unlawful possession of property, or avoid taxes and foreclosure. [2] [3]
Land patents are the right, title, and interest to a defined area. It is usually granted by a central, federal, or state government to an individual, partnership, trust, or private company.
The land patent is not to be confused with a land grant. Patented lands may be lands that had been granted by a sovereign authority in return for services rendered or accompanying a title or otherwise bestowed gratis, or they may be lands privately purchased by a government, individual, or legal entity from their prior owners.
"Patent" is both a process and a term. As a process, it is somewhat parallel to gaining a patent for intellectual property, including the steps of uniquely defining the property at issue, filing, processing, and granting. Unlike intellectual property patents, which have time limits, a land patent is permanent.
In the United States, all claims of land ownership can be traced back to a land patent, first-title deed, or similar document regarding land previously France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the Kingdom of Hawaii, Russia, or Native Americans. Other terms for the certificate that grants such rights include "first-title deed" and '"final certificate."[ citation needed ]
A land patent is known in law as "letters patent" and usually issues to the original grantee and to their heirs and assigns forever. The patent stands as supreme title to the land because it attests that all evidence of title existent before its issue date had been reviewed by the sovereign authority under which it was sealed and was so sealed as irrefutable. Thus, the land patent itself so becomes at law the title to the land defined within its four corners.
In practice, the irrefutability of counter-claims is relative, but once a patent is granted, permanence of title is established.
Land in the United States of America was acquired by claim, seizure, annexation, purchase, treaty, or war from France, Great Britain, the Kingdom of Hawaii, Mexico, Russia, Spain, and the Native American peoples.
As England, later to become Great Britain, began to colonize America, the Crown made large grants of territory to individuals and companies. In turn, the companies and colonial governors later made smaller grants of land based on actual surveys of the land. Thus, in colonial America on the Atlantic seaboard, a connection was made between the surveying of a land tract and its "patenting" as private property. Numerous other land patents were granted by the Crown for lands purchased by private individuals from Native American tribes.
Many original colonies' land patents came from the corresponding country of control like Great Britain. Most such patents were permanently granted. Those patents are still in force; the US government honors those patents by treaty law, and, as with all such land patents, they cannot be changed.
Many early patents of lands originally granted by Native peoples were contested, occasionally in court, as a result of different understandings of "private property" and "ownership" between those people. Indigenous Americans often held land and its bounties communally, reinforced by oral tradition, while those from Western Europe who held established and finite views on assets, their transfer, and their adjudication in a system of written laws, Crown rights and officials, courts, and permanent records.
After the American Revolution and the ratification of the US Constitution, the US Treasury Department was placed in charge of managing all public lands. In 1812, the United States General Land Office was created to assume that duty.
In accord with specific Acts of Congress and under the hand and seal of the US President, the General Land Office issued more than 2 million land grants made patent (land patents), passing the title of specific parcels of public land from the nation to private parties (individuals or private companies). Some of the land so granted had survey or other costs associated with it. Some patentees paid those fees for their land in cash, others homesteaded a claim, and still others came into ownership via one of the many donation acts that Congress passed to transfer public lands to private ownership. Whatever the method, the General Land Office followed a two-step procedure in granting a patent.
Firstly, the private claimant went to the land office in the land district in which the public land was located. The claimant filled out entry papers to select the public land, and the land office register (clerk) checked the local registrar records to make sure the claimed land was still available. The receiver (bursar) took the claimant's payment, because even homesteaders had to pay administrative fees.
Then, the district land office register and receiver sent the paperwork to the General Land Office in Washington. That office double-checked the accuracy of the claim, its availability and the form of payment. Finally, the General Land Office issued a land patent for the claimed public land and sent it on to the President for his signature.
The first US land patent was issued on March 4, 1788, to John Martin. [4] That patent reserves to the United States one third of all gold, silver, lead and copper within the claimed land.
Usage restrictions (such as oil and mineral rights, roadways, ditches, and canals) placed on the land are spelled out in the patent and are distinct from state and local statutory regulations relative to property appurtenant to the land, such as zoning and building codes, as well as property taxes applying to both land and property.
Private property rights accompanying land patents can also be thereafter negotiated in accord with the terms of private contracts. The rights inherent in patented land are carried from heir to heir, heir to assignee, or assignee to assignee and cannot be changed except by private contract (warranty deed, quitclaim deed, etc.). In most cases, the law of a particular piece of patented land will be governed by the Congressional Act or treaty under which it was acquired, or by terms spelled out in the patent. For example, US laws govern the land may involve the Homestead Act or reservations placed on the face of the patent, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo governs certain jurisdictional dicta relating to large amounts of land in California and adjoining territories.
Legal entities other than natural persons (such as trusts and corporations) may not obtain land patents except by express act of the US Congress.[ citation needed ] An example of Congress granting land through patents to corporate entities is the railroad grants made under the Pacific Railroad Acts to compensate the railroad companies for building a transnational railroad across America.[ citation needed ]
When a territory agreed to enter the United States, an Enabling Act was agreed to as a condition precedent of statehood. The Enabling Act requires that all unappropriated lands, which are not yet privately owned, to be forever disclaimed by the territory and the people of the territory and the title to ceded to the United States for its disposition. [5] For example, the enabling act of the Washington Territory declares in part:
...that the people inhabiting said proposed States do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries thereof, and to all lands lying within said limits owned or held by any Indian or Indian tribes; and that until the title thereto shall have been extinguished by the United States, the same shall be and remain subject to the disposition of the United States. ..
After the right and title to land was disclaimed by the people of the territory, it was held in trust by the United States until someone proved a claim to it, typically by improving the homestead parcel for a certain period of time. Once a proper claim has been filed, the United States General Land Office (now the Bureau of Land Management) certifies that the claimant has paid for a survey, as well as depositing another sum of money. Then, pursuant to the various land acts of Congress, the land is granted to the private owner by letters patent under the signature and seal of the US President.
The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than 160 million acres of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, were given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River. These acts were the first sovereign decisions of post-war North–South capitalist cooperation in the United States.
In property law, title is an intangible construct representing a bundle of rights in (to) a piece of property in which a party may own either a legal interest or equitable interest. The rights in the bundle may be separated and held by different parties. It may also refer to a formal document, such as a deed, that serves as evidence of ownership. Conveyance of the document may be required in order to transfer ownership in the property to another person. Title is distinct from possession, a right that often accompanies ownership but is not necessarily sufficient to prove it. In many cases, possession and title may each be transferred independently of the other. For real property, land registration and recording provide public notice of ownership information.
In the United States, a territory is any extent of region under the sovereign jurisdiction of the federal government of the United States, including all waters. The United States asserts sovereign rights for exploring, exploiting, conserving, and managing its territory. This extent of territory is all the area belonging to, and under the dominion of, the United States federal government for administrative and other purposes. The United States total territory includes a subset of political divisions.
The Virginia Military District was an approximately 4.2 million acre (17,000 km2) area of land in what is now the state of Ohio that was reserved by Virginia to use as payment in lieu of cash for its veterans of the American Revolutionary War.
The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, sometimes known as the Donation Land Act, was a statute enacted by the United States Congress in late 1850, intended to promote homestead settlements in the Oregon Territory. It followed the Distribution-Preemption Act 1841. The law, a forerunner of the later Homestead Act, brought thousands of settlers into the new territory, swelling their ranks along the Oregon Trail. 7,437 land patents were issued under the law, which expired in late 1855. The Donation Land Claim Act allowed white men or partial Native Americans who had arrived in Oregon before 1850 to work on a piece of land for four years and legally claim the land for themselves.
A land claim is "the pursuit of recognized territorial ownership by a group or individual". The phrase is usually only used with respect to disputed or unresolved land claims. Some types of land claims include aboriginal land claims, Antarctic land claims, and post-colonial land claims.
Federal lands are publicly owned lands in the United States managed by the federal government. Pursuant to the Property Clause of the United States Constitution, Congress has the power to retain, buy, sell, and regulate federal lands, such as by limiting cattle grazing on them. These powers have been recognized in a long series of United States Supreme Court decisions.
The act of cession is the assignment of property to another entity. In international law it commonly refers to land transferred by treaty. Ballentine's Law Dictionary defines cession as "a surrender; a giving up; a relinquishment of jurisdiction by a board in favor of another agency." In contrast with annexation, where property is forcibly seized, cession is voluntary or at least apparently so.
In the United States Code, the term color of law describes and defines an official action that has either a “mere semblance of legal right”, or the “pretense of right”, or the “appearance of right”, which adjusts and colors the law to the circumstance, whilst the apparently legal action is itself illegal. In U.S. and U.K. jurisprudence, an action realized under color of law is an act realized by an official as if he or she were authorized to take the apparently legal action not authorized by statute.
The Kinkaid Act of 1904 is a U.S. statute that amended the 1862 Homestead Act so that one section of public domain land could be acquired free of charge, apart from a modest filing fee. It applied specifically to 37 counties in northwest Nebraska, in the general area of the Nebraska Sandhills. The act was introduced by Moses Kinkaid, Nebraska's 6th congressional district representative, was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt on April 28, 1904 and went into effect on June 28 of that year.
The United States Court of Private Land Claims (1891–1904) was an ad-hoc court created to decide land claims guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in the territories of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, and in the states of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming.
The Constitution of the State of Nevada is the organic law of the state of Nevada, and the basis for Nevada's statehood as one of the United States.
The Timber Culture Act was a follow-up act to the Homestead Act. The Timber Culture Act was passed by Congress in 1873. The act allowed homesteaders to get another 160 acres (65 ha) of land if they planted trees on one-fourth of the land, because the land was "almost one entire plain of grass, which is and ever must be useless to cultivating man."
The Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 provided settlers 640 acres (260 ha) of public land—a full section or its equivalent—for ranching purposes. Unlike the Homestead Act of 1862 or the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, land homesteaded under the 1916 act separated surface rights from subsurface rights, resulting in what later became known as split estates. The subsurface rights, also known as mineral rights, are the foundation of recent oil and gas law in the United States.
Land grants in New Mexico and Colorado were awarded to individuals and communities by the Spanish and Mexican governments to encourage settlement and expansion of the Territorio de Nuevo Mexico, which included southern Colorado. Land grants by the Spanish and Mexicans between 1692 and 1846 numbered 291 in New Mexico, four partly in New Mexico and partly in Colorado, and three in Colorado. The land area of grants totaled tens of thousands of square miles. "The two major types of land grants were private grants made to individuals, and communal grants made to groups of people for the purpose of establishing settlements. Communal land grants were also made to Pueblos for the lands they inhabited." The majority of the land area within grants was designated as common land for residents. Common land was mostly used for grazing cattle and sheep and harvesting timber. Smaller acreages within the grants were devoted to irrigation agriculture and home sites. The principal objectives of the land grants were to encourage the foundation of new communities and to expand the settled area on the frontiers of New Mexico for defense from Indian raids.
The Marshall Court (1801–1835) issued some of the earliest and most influential opinions by the Supreme Court of the United States on the status of aboriginal title in the United States, several of them written by Chief Justice John Marshall himself. However, without exception, the remarks of the Court on aboriginal title during this period are dicta. Only one indigenous litigant ever appeared before the Marshall Court, and there, Marshall dismissed the case for lack of original jurisdiction.
An Organic Act is a generic name for a statute used by the United States Congress to describe a territory, in anticipation of being admitted to the Union as a state. Because of Oklahoma's unique history an explanation of the Oklahoma Organic Act needs a historic perspective. In general, the Oklahoma Organic Act may be viewed as one of a series of legislative acts, from the time of Reconstruction, enacted by Congress in preparation for the creation of a united State of Oklahoma. The Organic Act created Oklahoma Territory, and Indian Territory that were Organized incorporated territories of the United States out of the old "unorganized" Indian Territory. The Oklahoma Organic Act was one of several acts whose intent was the assimilation of the tribes in Oklahoma and Indian Territories through the elimination of tribes' communal ownership of property.
Highland Park, also known as Highland Pines, is a populated place situated near Prescott and within the Prescott National Forest, in Yavapai County, Arizona, United States. Highland Pines is the promotional name associated with the Highland Park areas several subdivisions. In the Arizona Territorial era up to 1912, and Statehood until around the late 1920s, this particular area of land acted as a cattle ranch with a mining history, lies within the Thumb Butte Mining District, which appears to be initially platted by the Arizona Corporation Highland Pine Properties Inc. beginning in the late 1950s.
In the United States, a public land state is a U.S. state in which all lands were originally public lands owned by the United States federal government, which later transferred them to private ownership – or to the ownership of state or local governments – through land grants. By contrast, a private land state is a U.S. state in which the federal government is not the original land-owner. In public land states, the federal government owns a significant proportion of the state's public lands; in private land states, federal land holdings are generally more limited, comprising lands acquired through purchase, donation or eminent domain for such purposes as military bases, federal office buildings, national parks, etc, and public lands are more frequently under the ownership of state or local governments.