evidence: Navassa: Property, Sovereignty, and the Law of the Territories abstract. The United States acquired its first overseas territory—Navassa Island, near Haiti—by conceptualizing it as a kind of property to be owned, rather than a piece of sovereign territory to be governed. The story of Navassa shows how competing conceptions of property and sovereignty are an important and underappreciated part of the law of the territories—a story that continued fifty years later in the Insular Cases, which described Puerto Rico as "belonging to" but not "part of" the United States. [...] To illustrate the significance of the property and sovereignty frameworks and set the stage for evaluating them, we begin with the story of a single overseas territory—the oldest of all the U.S. territories,12 and in that sense the place where the story of U.S. imperialism began: Navassa,13 a sunbaked and uninhabitable rock buried under a million tons of bird droppings, and located roughly forty miles from Haiti,14 which also claims the island.15 Beginning with an unoccupied and seemingly minor territory helps us isolate and grasp conceptual threads that run through the treatment of inhabited territories like Puerto Rico. Pulling on those threads can unravel a lot of colonial fabric.