Turtle Talk

Hello fellow Turtle Talk Readers!

For those who I haven’t yet met, my name is Keith Richotte and I am the Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona School of Law.

More importantly, I would like to introduce you to a new website that will hopefully be of interest to you and your network: The Supreme Court Indian Law Database. Recently launched, this resource offers a number of important features.

• It identifies every Indian law case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court (680 and counting). Placed chronologically, the list has a search function to allow a researcher to find a particular cases or cases easily

• It slots each case in one or more categories for identification and comparison. We have identified forty-three categories, including plenary power, criminal jurisdiction, treaties, and many others

• It lists every justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and their participation in the cases on the list. It also identifies how the justice voted and if they wrote in a particular case.

• The pages for each individual case identifies the other cases on the list that it cites and the cases where it has been cited. For example, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia cites three cases and has been cited forty-eight times

In the future, we intend on adding additional search functions to the list. Thus, hopefully before long a researcher will be able to easily identify cases decided between a certain date range, or cases that fall under the same four categories, or find out which three justices participated in the same cases or any combination of all three of these things and more.

In addition, there is room for debate for what counts as an Indian law case or for which category a particular case belongs. While acknowledging this certain subjectivity, quite a bit of thought and care went into curating the list. If you have questions about the list or would like to know how we came up with it I invite you to visit the methodology page.

Finally, while a lot of thought and care has been put into the list and the website, it is still very new and there is always room for improvement. To that end, if you have any constructive feedback you would like to share my email address is at the bottom of the main page.

I am so happy to be able to share this research with you. I, along with a small team (who you will eventually get to meet once we get our “contributor” page running), have been working diligently on this website for the past two years. It is free and available to the public and will be so as long as I have any say about it. My hope is that it will be a valuable resource for practitioners, scholars, students, tribal nations and peoples, and anyone else with an interest in Native America and a desire to see Indigenous peoples thrive. Thank you and happy searching on SCILDB.com!