About Who Owns America- and How Do We Know?: The History and Design of Title Registries in America

For four centuries, information about beneficial ownership, or the natural persons who own property, has been collected through the American recording system and contained in title registries. Indeed, over this span, the creation of title registries played a major role in the English conquest of tribal nations’ lands—as a governmental system for affirming property claims, it had the power to draw settlers seeking to become owners to a region still under Native control. In this talk, Park tells the story of how title registries helped to establish jurisdictional power in America... and also the role that they are now playing in undermining it. The structure that facilitated this conquest was a minimal, low-accountability one. And recently, due to some major changes in how people use registries, information that was long available to us—information about who owns land in America—is disappearing from the public record. As a public, we are largely unaware of the daily erosion of this information, or the lack of legal controls over it. The rise of anonymity in the record has no backstop and is giving rise to new forms of property without owners who may soon have no accountability at all.

About K-Sue Park

K-Sue Park is a Professor of Law at UCLA. Her research and scholarship examines the development of American property law and the creation of the American real estate market through the histories of colonization and enslavement. Previously, she was a Professor of Law at Georgetown, the Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA, and an Equal Justice Works Fellow and housing attorney in El Paso, TX.

Park holds a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.Phil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She has also been a Fulbright Scholar, a Javits Fellow, an Emerson Collective Fellow and the Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. and Annette L. Nazareth Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Park’s work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, and the New York Times, among other places. She teaches Property, Housing Law and Policy, a practicum on Black land loss and reparations, and is working on a book tentatively entitled, All We Have Forgotten About How the Land Made Us, under contract with Harvard University Press.

About Design and Politics in Transition

Who should design serve? How does design work in a crisis, and also recognizing that some people have been living in crisis for hundreds of years? And how might we reimagine design as a radical discipline for dialogue and action? From reinterpreting legal histories and theories that enable the design of place, to redesigning food distribution systems around food and land justice, to transforming what it means to be family, design offers many ways to transform our relationships with ourselves, each other and our environment. Design and Politics in Transition offers inspiration, theory, and guidance on a variety of design practices and epistemologies that together help us transition toward different, more equitable worlds where all can thrive–even during historical moments of political and social strife.