Author: Matthew L.M. Fletcher

While lawmakers have long known that Native American women experience gender-based violence at higher rates than any other population, lawmakers historically have addressed these harms by implementing jurisdictional changes: removing tribal jurisdiction entirely, limiting tribal jurisdiction, or returning jurisdiction to tribes in a piecemeal fashion. The result is a “jurisdictional maze” that law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and courts are unable to successfully administer to bring perpetrators to justice. This Article is the first to identify what I call “jurisdictional transparency”—or clear, easily ascertainable rules governing courts’ jurisdiction—as a core value of the American legal system and will argue that a lack of jurisdictional transparency over criminal prosecutions in Indian country contributes to the excessive rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, and rape against Native American women. Because arguments for or against sovereignty are divisive and often put a swift end to productive dialogue, this has often led to the layering of more jurisdictional rules on top of the current system. Jurisdictional transparency, on the other hand, advocates an approach that is both more fundamental and more attainable: allocating criminal jurisdiction in Indian country in a way that can be easily determined at the outset of a case.

The Article begins by examining jurisdictional rules in other contexts while highlighting the federal courts’ continuous demand for clear jurisdictional rules in the interest of judicial efficiency and public access to the courts. With this backdrop, the Article then illuminates the discrepancy between such transparency demands and the opaque jurisdictional rules in Indian Country, using key case examples to demonstrate the system’s failures. Finally, the Article proposes a solution that is reflected in numerous facets of the law: jurisdictional transparency. Such a solution has a procedural guise capable of penetrating a polarized political climate while lifting the opacity that has prevented thousands of Native American women from accessing justice.

Federal Court Dismisses Miss. Choctaw from FTCA Claim, Claim against US Proceeds

May 19, 2020May 19, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here are the materials in Chipmon v. United States (S.D. Miss.):

42 MBCI Motion to Dismiss

43 Memo in Support

42-1 MBCI v Peebles Opinion

42-2 Sharp v MBCI Opinion

50 DCT Order

Prior post here.

Jim Grijalva on the Gap in Indian Country Water Quality Protection

May 18, 2020May 18, 2020Matthew L.M. Fletcher

James Grijalva has posted “Ending the Interminable Gap in Indian Country Water Quality Protection,” forthcoming in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, on SSRN.

The abstract:

Tribal self-determination in modern environmental law holds the tantalizing prospect of translating Indigenous environmental value judgments into legally enforceable requirements of federal regulatory programs. Congress authorized this approach three decades ago, but few tribes have sought primacy even for foundational programs like Clean Water Act water quality standards, contributing to potentially serious environmental injustices. This article analyzes in detail EPA’s recent attempt at reducing tribal barriers — reinterpreting the Act as a congressional delegation of tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians — and the early indications its results are insignificant. The article then proposes an unconventional solution ostensibly at odds with tribal self-determination: promulgation of national, federal water quality standards for Indian country. EPA’s Indian Program actually began this way, as an interim step awaiting tribes’ assumption of federal regulatory programs. Thirty years later, the seemingly interminable regulatory gap in Indian country water quality protection remains, and EPA has a legal and moral responsibility to close it.