Author: Kate Fort

New Mexico’s Sex Offender Law Not Applicable in Indian Country

Kate Fort

The New Mexico Court of Appeals ruled that Indians living in Indian Country, not employed or in school outside of Indian Country who were convicted of sex offenses in a court other than a New Mexico court, are not required to register on the New Mexico sex offender list as required by New Mexico law.

The specific question presented then is whether the two statutes [42 U.S.C. § 14071 (1998), as amended by “Megan’s Law” ]can be deemed an express statement by Congress that state sex offender registration laws shall apply in Indian country. We hold that they cannot. The language of the statutes betrays no indication that Congress intended the term “resident” by itself to override historically recognized and accepted limits on the reach of state criminal and regulatory law in Indian country. The type of language specifically referring to Indians and Indian
tribes which would support a conclusion that Congress intended to override tribal sovereignty is simply missing.

New York Times coverage

Opinion

UKB v. HUD–10th Cir. Overturns Agency Interpretation of NAHASDA

Kate Fort

The 10th Circuit found that the regulations used by HUD to deliver funds under NAHASDA did not conform to the clear intent of Congress.  Specifically, the United Keetoowah Band’s lack of court jurisdiction did not mean the tribe could not receive funding.

The absence of such a connection means that HUD’s imposition of the [section]1000.302 Formula Area court jurisdiction requirement as a threshold for need-based funding over the minimum allocation is contrary to Congress’s plainly expressed intent because it leads to funding allocations based on factors that do not reflect tribal housing needs. This conclusion finds no better illustration than the case at hand: the UKB’s need for housing assistance did not abate when HUD concluded that the UKB lacked the ability to claim court jurisdiction.

Opinion

Online Documents of Maori Legal History

Kate Fort

From the Legal History Blog:

The New Zealand Legal Text Centre had recently launched an on-line archive of documents relating to the legal history of the Maori, the indigenous people of the islands. Here is the announcement:

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is proud to announce the launch of the Legal Maori Archive, a collection of more than 14,000 pages of around 250 19th century documents that illustrate the bi-lingual nature of New Zealand’s legal history. The Legal Maori Archive is freely available to the public and can be accessed via the NZETC website.

Among the many documents featured in this collection are the following:

The Proceedings of the Kotahitanga Parliaments

Henry Hanson Turton’s Maori Deeds of Land Purchases in the North Island of New Zealand

Maori translations of Acts and Bills circulated among Maori communities by the Crown

The Archive has been created in conjunction with Mamari Stephens from the Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Law as part of a project to establish a corpus of legal Maori documents, which will allow the analysis of the language and eventually a dictionary of legal Maori terms and concepts. It is the first time the documents have been brought together in one place and is the largest collection of separate documents that the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has digitised. The Legal Maori Project seeks to resource speakers of te reo Maori who may not currently have access to a shared vocabulary to describe Western legal concepts. This Project will collate, develop and make available the terminology from Legal Maori texts, including those from the Legal Maori Archive, to all speakers and learners of te reo Maori and all researchers

Alexie on the Kindle

Kate Fort

There’s been a lot of debate and discussion lately about the Kindle, Amazon.com and the fate of the printed book.  Sherman Alexie weighed in on the inequity of the Kindle recently, and gave an interesting interview clarifying his concerns.

From Ed Champion’s blog:

As noted by Kassia Kroszer and others, Sherman Alexie recently expressed some controversial remarks in relation to the eReader. At a BookExpo panel, Alexie called the Amazon Kindle “elitist” and said that he wanted to hit a woman sitting on a plane who was using a Kindle on her flight to New York.

Now since I’m a man known to make extraordinary statements myself, I recognized Alexie’s pugilistic promise as the conversational theater he intended. Nevertheless, I was baffled by Alexie’s position. So I took it upon myself to contact Alexie to figure out where the guy was coming from. I didn’t believe the boilerplate message on his website was enough. Alexie was very gracious to respond to my questions.

Why do you consider the Kindle “elitist?”

I consider the Kindle elitist because it’s too expensive. I also consider it elitist because, right now, one company is making all the rules. I am also worried about Jeff Bezos’ comments about wanting to change the way we read books. That’s rather imperial. Having grown up poor, I’m also highly aware that there’s always a massive technology gap between rich and poor kids. I haven’t yet heard what Amazon plans to do about this potential technology gap. And that’s a vital question considering that Bezos wants to change the way we read books. How does he plan to change the way that poor kids read books? How does he plan to make sure that poor kids have access to the technology? Poor kids all over the country don’t have access to current textbooks, so will they have access to Kindle?

The rest of the interview can be read here.

Cert Denied in Arizona Snowbowl Case

Kate Fort1 Comment

The Supreme Court denied cert in the Arizona Snowbowl case today, link via SCOTUSblog.  Our materials on the case are posted here.

Hardin Prison, Crow Tribe, and Gitmo Detainees

Kate Fort

A year ago, the City of Hardin did not want the Crow Tribe to take over the large, empty prison which failed to bring in the promised jobs at the time of its construction.  Apparently the city was afraid the Tribe would “annex” the prison and somehow make it part of the reservation.

A year later, and with the prison still empty, the City of Hardin has offered to house the Gitmo detainees in the same prison.  Tribal involvement and BIA contracts were too scary, but the Gitmo detainees (and, one has to imagine, accompanying federal contracts) are just fine.

Sotomayor to be Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee

Kate Fort1 Comment

As reported on NPR, the Washington Post, and the NY Times.  TurtleTalk’s coverage of her federal Indian Law cases is here:

1. CA2 Judge Sonia Sotomayor

Judge Sotomayor has written the majority opinions in two unexceptional Indian law cases, Catskill Development v. Park Place Entertainment (2008 ) and United States v. White (2001). Catskill Development involved the authority of the National Indian Gaming Commission to review and opine on gaming management contracts, and White involved the federal prosecution of Mohawk Indians for failure to report income to the IRS. Judge Sotomayor has some Indian law exposure, but not on anything controversial.

Judge Sotomayor also voted with the majority in Bassett v. Mashantucket Pequot (2000), a case affirming the sovereign immunity of the tribe.

From the NPR story:

NPR.org, May 26, 2009 · President Obama will nominate federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court, NPR has learned. If confirmed, Sotomayor will become the first Hispanic to serve on the high court.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Sotomayor was nominated to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President Clinton. She previously served as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and in private practice in New York, specializing in intellectual property law, international litigation and commodities export trading.

Obama is expected to announce the nomination Tuesday morning. The president had said publicly he wanted a justice who combined intellect and empathy – the ability to understand the troubles of everyday Americans.

Sotomayor is a Puerto Rican. Her father, a tool-and-die worker, died when she was 9. Raised by her mother, a nurse, Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, then went to Yale Law School, where she served on the law journal.

More National Granholm Coverage

Kate Fort

Full article at the Washington Post:

Governor Granholm’s Rise to Politics

A Career That Began With a Reganesque Start

By Amy Goldstein

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 20, 2009; 3:43 PM

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is a darling of moderate Democratic politics who would become the first justice in nearly four decades without experience as a judge–and the first since the Great Depression born outside the United States.

Granholm, 50, is in her second term of a governorship that has been defined largely by the persistent economic troubles of her state, the heart of the U.S. automobile industry with unemployment that remains highest in the country.

Since she was elected in 2002, Granholm has focused on trying to lure other employers to Michigan, strengthening education, revising taxes, and ideas such as a “cool cities” initiative to deter talented young residents from moving away.

Her path to political power runs through Hollywood, Harvard Law School and a series of public-sector legal jobs of relatively low visibility until she catapulted to her first elected office as Michigan’s attorney general.

Interview with NNALSA President, a UofM Law Student

Kate Fort

From The Buffalo News:

Heritage held fast by legal scholar

By Louise Continelli

News Staff Reporter

LOCKPORT—Joshua Clause, 2001 Niagara Falls High School graduate, has been elected president of the National Native American Law Student Association.

You may have seen Clause in his earlier days, earning money for college as a gas-pump attendant at Randy’s Smoke Shop on the rural Tuscarora Reservation in Lewiston. A Mohawk Indian, he earned his degree from Dartmouth College in 2005.

But Clause, enrolled at Six Nations Reserve, didn’t forget his Indian heritage. He’ll earn his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School next year, and says he’d like to return to the Niagara Frontier: “home—to be close to my family and focus my work supporting my people, the Haudenosaunee.”

The Iroquois Confederacy, or “People of the Longhouse”—Mohawk, Tuscarora, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida and Onondaga— presided over more than one-fifth of this continent’s land mass before Columbus arrived.

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Review of African Cherokees in Indian Territory

Kate Fort1 Comment

Angela Hudson reviews Celia E. Naylor’s new book African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens on H-Net Reviews.  The reviewer compares it favorably with Prof. Tiya Miles’ book, The Ties That Bind, which is certainly a strong recommendation:

Dislodging Comfortable Fictions

Debates about the citizenship status of Cherokee freedmen and their descendents have filled newspapers, Web sites, conference rooms, and e-mail inboxes over the past two years and have ranged from the thoughtful to the downright vicious, leaving nearly no aspect of the controversy untouched. But as Celia E. Naylor’s recent book makes clear, there is still a great deal more we can learn about the lives, loves, fates, and desires of people of African descent who lived among the Cherokees from the 1830s through the first decade of the twentieth century. In African Cherokees in Indian Territory, Naylor aims to “lift the veil” that still covers the world of “enslaved and free African-descended people in the 19th-century Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory” (p. 3).

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