Land patent
land grant made by a sovereign entity
A land patent is a form of letters patent assigning official ownership of a particular tract of land that has gone through various legally-prescribed processes like surveying and documentation, followed by the letter's signing, sealing, and publishing in public records, made by a sovereign entity. While land patents are still issued by governments to indicate property is privately held, they are also often used by sovereign citizens and similar groups in illegitimate attempts to gain unlawful possession of property, or avoid taxes and foreclosure.
Land patents are the right, title, and interest to a defined area. It is usually granted by a central, federal, or state government to an individual, partnership, trust, or private company.
The land patent is not to be confused with a land grant. Patented lands may be lands that had been granted by a sovereign authority in return for services rendered or accompanying a title or otherwise bestowed gratis, or they may be lands privately purchased by a government, individual, or legal entity from their prior owners.
"Patent" is both a process and a term. As a process, it is somewhat parallel to gaining a patent for intellectual property, including the steps of uniquely defining the property at issue, filing, processing, and granting. Unlike intellectual property patents, which have time limits, a land patent is permanent.
A land patent, known in law as "letters patent," typically issues to the original grantee and their heirs and assigns in perpetuity.
“Land patent” enters the record as land grant made by a sovereign entity. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Land, patent and land can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Land patent” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Land, patent and land provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16253261. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Land patent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.