Abstract: From the late twentieth century to the present, postcolonial states have undertaken large-scale efforts to recognise, formalise, and protect “traditional” land tenure. Yet rather than stabilising land relations, these processes are systematically generating new landholding class structures, reifying social affiliation, and producing novel forms of political authority in the form of customary representatives and custodians. Existing accounts typically interpret such projects as moments of neoliberalisation, variants of primitive accumulation, or ‘pluralistic’ compromises between customary and statutory legal orders. This presentation argues that these framings underestimate both the scale and the specificity of an unfolding world-historical transformation. Synthesising theories of documentation and property with ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea and comparative evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific, I show how externally incentivised legal recognition, driven by postcolonial state formation, neo-traditionalist ideology, and developmental projects, have and are generating novel political and land relations through documented litigation rather than expropriation. I conceptualise this process as the juridification of land: a mechanism through which contingent social relations, conflicts, and inequalities are translated into novel class and political formations, rendered durable through adjudicative documentation. Rather than dispossessing through seizure or merely recording claims, juridification constitutes new sets of legally recognised actors—landowners, representatives, and custodians—endowed with enforceable, inheritable, and litigable positions. By situating juridification process alongside, but distinct from, European enclosure and settler-colonial appropriation, the article reframes postcolonial land reform as an ongoing third major movement of land transformation in the modern world.