Gregory Ablavsky’s “Beyond the Indian Commerce Clause: Robert Natelson’s Problematic ‘Cite-Check’” is at the Stanford Law School blog, Legal Aggregate.
An excerpt:
Here’s that context: In 2007, Mr. Natelson wrote a law review article on the original understanding of the Indian Commerce Clause. Justice Thomas later cited Mr. Natelson’s article in a 2013 concurrence questioning Congress’s authority to enact the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). In 2015, while a graduate student finishing my J.D./Ph.D. in American Legal History at Penn, I published Beyond the Indian Commerce Clause in the YLJ, which revisited original understandings of the sources of federal power over Indian affairs. In the article, I argued that the Founders thought that the federal government’s authority rested not just on the Indian Commerce Clause but on the interplay between multipleconstitutional provisions, including the Treaty Clause, the Territory Clause, the war powers, the law of nations, and the Constitution’s limits on state authority. The article also challenged Justice Thomas’s and Mr. Natelson’s conclusions in what Mr. Natelson later conceded was a “generally respectful” tone. Since the article, a number of subsequent articles by other scholars, some right-of-center and others disagreeing with my conclusions, have similarly challenged Mr. Natelson’s views.
Recommended reading. Professor Ablavsky is the leading legal historian of federal Indian law right now and filed a compelling amicus brief in Brackeen (here).
Turtle Talk 