ABSTRACT
The management of public lands is becoming an increasingly important, and controversial, problem for a number of reasons. Initially, the lands obtained by grants from the English Crown, by conquest where claims conflicted, and perhaps most notably by the Louisiana and Alaska purchases, were long looked upon as the means by which to advance economic development by selective alienation. This has given rise to many problems in the definition of property rights, to which we shall devote a very substantial part of this paper. But for the moment it can be noted that although these lands were more or less systematically alienated for one or another purpose—subsidizing the construction of railroads, land transfers for purposes of accelerating the development of the West, as in homesteading, and the like—a very large part of the total original lands remain in public ownership. Considering the 2 billion acres in the entire United States, roughly three-quarters of a billion, or a third of the total, remain in public ownership. For comparative purposes, this is larger by a comfortable margin than the area of all the eastern European countries combined and approximately equal to that of the Common Market countries.
