Fear and Contempt

American legal system, despite a nagging sense that it infringes on their freedom. Other Americans have a different view. They view the legal system as participating in that which it is sworn to prevent - the theft of freedom and possessions. Native Americans serve as an example of such people, fated to experience the legal system in reverse. They are an effective example because of the magnitude of their loss, a loss that can be measured in eighty-six million acres of North American real estate and all but a shred of their original freedom. dynamics of this jarring assertion provide a sobering view of American justice, majority and minority identity, and the concept of property. As it turns out, concepts of law, identity, and property have been employed in a way that only careful unpacking will shed light on the ways in which they have been used. For the European settler who arrived in North America in say the 1600s, the natural landscape and its inhabitants represented a howling wilderness (Drinnon, 398). transformation of this wilderness into civilization was quickly conceived in terms of an antithesis between freedom and the law. In the words of Henry Nash Smith, The narrative turns constantly about the central issue of the old forest freedom versus the new needs of a community which must establish the sovereignty of law over the individual (68). While it seems logical enough that law and order were necessary to the settlement process, what is not clear are related events of a more clandestine nature. Americans often get their sense of the role the law played in civilizing America from works of popular culture, such as books and movies. In the majority of those works, good settlers are portrayed as needing the protection of the law against bad Indians and other bad settlers. evidence of treaties and actual court cases of the time, however, paints a very different picture - a picture of a rich minority protecting itself against a poor majority, comprised of both Native Americans and Euro-Americans. For example, a New York state convention held in 1820 to revise the New York constitution reveals lawmaking intended to address much larger political issues than the protection of a hardworking citizenry. New York Republicans of the time were worried about encroachment by opposing Democrats who purported to represent the people against those with

Contempt · Epistemology · Political science · Property (philosophy · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Philosophy · Property Rights and Legal Doctrine · Psychology · Social Psychology

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