Symposium – 2025 – Promises of SovereigntyTribal Sovereignty, Justice Gorsuch, and the Letter of the Law by Desmond Mantle on July 23, 2025 I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent! —Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg Introduction This Comment seeks to defend Justice Neil Gorsuch’s approach to statutory interpretation, arguing against pragmatist efforts to reduce the Supreme Court’s reliance on textualism and against efforts by fellow self-proclaimed textualists…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty What We Talk About When We Talk About (Indian) Sovereignty: Montana and the Application of General Statutes to Tribes by Annelisa Kingsbury Lee on July 23, 2025 Montana v. US is a case about tribal civil jurisdiction. Yet it has had a second life in a surprising context: federal statutes of general applicability that do not mention tribes. This Comment explores the circuit split on these silent statutes and shows that Montana is the doctrinal lynchpin for every court that has considered…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty Separation-of-Powers Formalism and Federal Indian Law: The Question of Executive Order Reservations by Isaac Cui on July 23, 2025 Introduction The creation of Indian reservations largely coincided with and was facilitated by the development of presidential authority to withdraw public lands for Indian purposes. Of the roughly 42.8 million acres of total tribal trust lands in 1951, slightly over 23 million were set aside through executive order. That number far dwarfs any other method…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty Tribal Revestiture by Lauren van Schilfgaarde on July 23, 2025 I. Implicit Divestiture Presumes Cultural Incompatibility Tribes have a precarious political posture in relation to the United States. Tribes are distinctly sovereign and extra-constitutional, but are also without meaningful external infrastructure to define and protect their legal status in relation to the United States. That is, the U.S. recognizes Tribes as “domestic dependent nations,” but…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty Indigenous Rights to Culture: What’s Next? by Angela R. Riley on July 23, 2025 Introduction For more than two centuries, the United States has maintained—in law and in practice—a colonial system designed to destroy Indigenous peoples’ culture. My work has explored this phenomenon from a property lens, explaining how attacks on Indigenous cultures traverse and encompass all categories of property, including real, tangible, and intangible. From a property perspective,…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty The Supreme Court’s Old Habits in a New Era? Native Nations, Statehood, and an Indigenous-led Future for Natural Resources by Monte Mills on July 23, 2025 Introduction After rising from the depths of eras in which the United States intended to eliminate Native Nations, tribal sovereignty remains ascendant. With respect to natural resources, the governance of Native Nations has expanded to more fully occupy the legal space reserved in treaties with the United States. Across the country, Native Nations have built…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty Federal Indian Law in a Time of Judicial Self-Aggrandizement by Dan Lewerenz on July 23, 2025 Introduction The Supreme Court is accumulating power. Call it “concentrating power in the court,” a “judicial power grab,” or (as a growing number of scholars are calling it) “judicial aggrandizement” or “judicial self-aggrandizement.” Each of these ideas describes a Supreme Court that is upsetting accepted notions of the separation of powers—accumulating power for itself, often…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty Against Judicial Generalists by Matthew L.M. Fletcher on July 23, 2025 There is something irritatingly wrong with Indian law practice at the Supreme Court. Oral argument at the Supreme Court is a bitterly unpleasant affair for Indigenous people and tribal advocates for a lengthy variety of reasons. It is canonical that tribal advocates must attempt to avoid Supreme Court review; the strategic thinking is that the…Volume 77 (2024-2025)Symposium – 2025 – Promises of Sovereignty Can the Roberts Court Find Federal Indian Law? by Seth Davis on July 23, 2025 Introduction Imagine the lost world of “lawfinding.” In that world, there was a general common law for federal judges to find. And in that world, each statute had a “single, best meaning” for judges to unearth with the traditional tools of statutory interpretation. Of course, we are not going back to that world. Too much…Volume 77 (2024-2025)
Turtle Talk 