Turtle Talk

Here is Bizindan Miinawa (Listen Again), available on SSRN and prepared for the Tribal Law Journal’s symposium on Johnson v. McIntosh.

An excerpt:

Are any United States Supreme Court cases real? Johnson v. McIntosh was fake as John Wayne’s teeth. That one was a property dispute, remember? Two wealthy, privileged, and powerful white people squared off over thousands of acres of land acquired from Indigenous nations who called the vast valley of Eagle River home. On one side, you had a former United States Supreme Court justice; on the other, you had a wealthy political benefactor/beneficiary — imagine if a case called Stephen Breyer v. Harlan Crow about Indian land ownership was pending in the Roberts Court’s 2023 Term. No tribal nations or Indigenous peoples to be seen or heard from, or in more modern practice were not allowed to participate. Both attorneys were secretly paid for by the same company — imagine if Stephen Breyer’s attorney (say, Neal Kaytal) was secretly retained by the Trammel Crow Company (or even better, by Club For Growth, his political action committee) to oppose Harlan Crow’s attorney, who would probably be Paul Clement or Ty Cobb. And of course, the property claims at issue barely overlapped, if at all, thanks to stipulations of the parties at the trial level that formed the basis of the factual dispute. It was a sham case.