Turtle Talk

Daniel B. Rice has posted “The Moral Complacency of Federal Indian Law,” forthcoming from the Minnesota Law Review, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

For all its association with historical tragedy, federal Indian law remains thoroughly amoral. The field draws little distinction between horrific and laudable traditions. In sharp contrast with the Court’s equality doctrines, Indian law continues to rest on explicit structural subordination. Its core precepts tolerate the worst forms of historical treachery and cultural annihilation, treating such practices as legally generative in the present. This Article identifies Indian law’s moral vacuity as an unexplained and unjustified aberration. It urges the Court to speak and theorize about Indian law in a register befitting the subject’s moral gravity.

The Article offers a trio of explanations for Indian law’s enduring amorality—ones focused on reliance interests, strategic suppression by pro-tribal actors, and a desire to avoid broadcasting uncomfortable truths. It finds these reasons insufficient to justify the Court’s nonrecognition of historical evil. Although full decolonization is by now infeasible, the tonal shift I propose would help distance the Court from colonialism’s wrongs and un-skew the normative atmosphere in which lawyers debate the past’s continuing effects. It would also facilitate incremental reforms that could improve tribes’ litigation prospects dramatically.

In recent years, Justice Gorsuch has shown that Indian law’s moral complacency need not be accepted as natural or inevitable. But I question his insistence that the field can be set aright by adhering to original textual bargains. It is the ethical narratives to which Gorsuch subscribes, rather than his methodological commitments, that hold the promise of tempering Indian law’s most outrageous features. I also critique Gorsuch’s recent suggestion that Indian law contains an “anticanon” whose repudiation would rid the doctrine of its worst excesses. Moral socialization in this field should occur through the rejection of ideas, not the select vilification of cases with complicated legacies.