Tribal Law
Disenrollment as Citizenship Revocation: Promoting Tribal Sovereignty by Embracing International Norms
This Note argues that Indian tribes can best address disenrollment by viewing the problem through the lens of international norms regarding citizenship revocation. In choosing to embrace these norms, tribes can restrict disenrollment in a manner that does not simply invoke tribal sovereignty but instead promotes it.
The Three Lives of Mamengwaa: Toward an Indigenous Canon of Construction
Many of the intractable political disputes that plague tribal nations can be traced to the reliance on legal principles that are poor fits in Indigenous contexts. I suggest the acknowledgment of an Indigenous canon of construction of tribal laws by tribal judiciaries that will benefit legal development in tribal nations.
(Re)Solving the Tribal No-Forum Conundrum: Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community
Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community, a dispute over a controversial off-reservation Indian casino, is the latest opportunity for the Supreme Court to address the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity. The Court could hand Michigan a big win by broadly abrogating tribal immunity, and in turn wreak havoc on modern tribal governance. Alternately, the Court could hand Bay Mills a victory by affirming the tribe’s immunity, effectively precluding judicial review of the tribe’s casino project. In this Essay, Professor Matthew L.M. Fletcher argues that neither choice is preferable to a third option that would both advance tribal self-determination and hold tribes accountable to outsiders. The Court could condition tribal immunity in federal or state court on whether the tribe has solved the no-forum problem by providing a tribal forum for the resolution of important disputes.
Property in All the Wrong Places?
114 Yale L.J. 991 (2005) In Who Owns Native Culture? and Public Lands and Political Meaning, an anthropologist and a historian document an ever-increasing deployment of property categories in two quite different domains: native people's recent cultural claims in the first book and the longer story of the United States's public rangelands in the second. Both authors take a jaundiced view of this growth in propertization, arguing that in their respective subjects, property rhetoric paralyzes fluid and negotiated problem solving while undermining respectful relationships among parties. This Review suggests, however, that both authors may be underestimating the ability of property institutions to morph into new and useful forms--forms that can aid wide-ranging negotiations and enhance respect and understanding among the participating persons and groups.