The Office of the General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (OGC) is seeking applications for a general attorney positions in its San Francisco Regional Office. The San Francisco Office of OGC provides legal services to 4 administrative areas of the Indian Health Service (IHS), which delivers health care to American Indians/Alaska Natives. Persons selected for some or all of these positions will have responsibility for providing legal advice and support to the IHS. More information about the positions and the nature of our work is in the attached vacancy announcement.
We’re beginning to think we have an inkling of Sisyphus’s fate. Courts of law exist to resolve disputes so that both sides might move on with their lives. Yet here we are, forty years in, issuing our seventh opinion in the Ute line and still addressing the same arguments we have addressed so many times before. Thirty years ago, this court decided all boundary disputes between the Ute Indian Tribe, the State of Utah, and its subdivisions. The only thing that remained was for the district court to memorialize that mandate in a permanent injunction. Twenty years ago, we modified our mandate in one respect, but stressed that in all others our decision of a decade earlier remained in place. Once more, we expected this boundary dispute to march expeditiously to its end. Yet just last year the State of Utah and several of its counties sought to relitigate those same boundaries. And now one of its cities tries to do the same thing today. Over the last forty years the questions haven’t changed — and neither have our answers. We just keep rolling the rock.
In State v. Comenout, our Supreme Court upheld the State’s exercise of nonconsensual criminal jurisdiction over tribal members selling unstamped cigarettes from an unlicensed store located on trust allotment property lying outside the borders of an Indian reservation. Edward Comenout challenges that decision in this administrative forfeiture action appeal arising out of the same seized cigarettes at issue in Comenout. He claims Comenout is not binding because the case was remanded and ultimately dismissed. But we are bound by that decision unless and until the Washington Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court rules otherwise. Neither court has done so. And under Comenout, it is clear the State court had personal and subject matter jurisdiction in this administrative forfeiture action and that Comenout is not exempt from the State’s cigarette tax as an “Indian retailer.” Because Comenout fails to establish any error of law or arbitrary and capricious action under the Administrative Procedure Act2 (APA) standards, we affirm
Keynote Speaker. Kevin Washburn is currently a law professor, and was previously the dean, of the UNM School of Law. Washburn previously served as the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the Obama Administration in Washington, D.C. from 2012 through the end of 2015. In that role, he was the highest ranking official in charge of federal Indian policy for the United States government, overseeing the Bureaus of Indian Affairs and Indian Education, together consisting of more than 8000 employees, and executed a budget of roughly $2.8 Billion. He also testified approximately thirty times before Congressional Committees and worked on a daily basis with the White House. He also appeared several times before the United Nations in Geneva to defend our nation’s adherence to international treaties.
Washburn graduated from Yale Law School, and has been a trial attorney at the Department of Justice in Washington and a federal prosecutor in New Mexico. He also served as the general counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission, a federal regulatory agency in Washington, D.C. As an academic, he has taught law at the University of Arizona, the University of Minnesota and Harvard Law School. He also has several books to his name, and is a co-author/co-editor of the Cohen Handbook.
Washburn began his legal education in 1990 at the Pre-Law Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico. He is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.
NITA is honored and pleased to have Kevin Washburn as the keynote speaker for this year’s conference. Additional conference details and registration information can be found on NITA’s website at: http://intertribaltaxalliance.org/
Turtle Talk 
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