Turtle Talk

Interesting development, in that the State found a tribal court case adopting the infamous 11-part test cobbled together by the Colorado Court of Appeals (earlier briefs are here):

Resp. Cross-Petitioners Notice of Supp. Authority

Tribal Response to Supplemental Authority

In our experience, tribal courts rarely apply a common law test in determining whether or not a tribal business entity is immune from suit. They don’t need to, given that tribal business entities are created via a document (e.g., articles of incorporation) or statute (e.g., tribal corporations code) that spells out in exacting detail the contours of immunity.

Strangely, state courts adopting these 11- or 3- or 5-part tests (or whatever) don’t spend enough time looking at the tribal statutory law, and are prone to creating common law for their own purposes.

Colorado seems to be trying to play a weird game of “gotcha!” here. Not sure how this material is relevant. Now if they had found a case from Miami Tribe or Santee Sioux tribal court, hmmm….