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- 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. Fletcher v. Peck (1810) and Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), the first and the most detailed explorations of the subject by Marshall, respectively, both arose out of collusive lawsuits, where land speculators presented an artificial case and controversy in order to elicit the desired precedent. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the dicta of Marshall and the dissenting justices embraced a far broader view of aboriginal title. Johnson involved a pre-Revolutionary private conveyances from 1773 and 1775; Mitchell v. United States (1835) involved 1804 and 1806 conveyances in Florida under Spanish rule. However, in both cases, the Marshall Court continued to apply the rule that aboriginal title was inalienable, except to The Crown. This inalienability principle—whether embodied by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Confederation Congress Proclamation of 1783, the Nonintercourse Acts of 1790, 1793, 1796, 1799, 1802, or 1833, or the federal common law—remains the crux of the modern Indian land claim litigation. Several other cases involved disputes between non-Indians holding land grants from different states or state nonintercourse acts; federal courts had subject-matter jurisdiction over such disputes as "Controversies . . . between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States." For example, Preston v. Browder (1816), Danforth's Lessee v. Thomas (1816), and Danforth v. Wear (1824) involved conflicting land grants from the states of North Carolina and Tennessee. (en)
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