News – Page 201 – Turtle Talk

From the Michigan Lawyer Blog. Judge Zahra was appointed to the Court of Appeals in 1999 by then-Governor Engler. Prior to that he was a judge in Wayne County. He does not appear to have participated in any decisions on the Indian Child Welfare Act or other state Indian law cases.

Also from the Oakland Press:

LANSING (AP) — Gov. Rick Snyder has named Appeals Court Judge Brian Zahra (ZAR’-uh) to the Michigan Supreme Court.

Zahra will replace Justice Maura Corrigan, who is stepping down Friday to become director of the state Department of Human Services.

Zahra turned 51 on Sunday. He was appointed to the appeals court in 1999 by GOP Gov. John Engler and elected to the court in 2000 and 2006.

The Northville resident was a Wayne County Circuit Court judge from 1994-98 and an attorney and partner at the Dickinson Wright law firm from 1989-94.

Snyder made the announcement at a news conference Monday morning.

The appointment means the court will keep its 4-3 Republican majority. The move gives Snyder a chance to put his mark on the Supreme Court within days of taking office.

NYTs: Rosen on Scalia and Originalism

January 9, 2011Matthew L.M. Fletcher

An excerpt from the NYTs:

“If you took the originalists at their word,” said David Strauss, a liberal University of Chicago law professor, “you could punish people for criticizing the government, the federal government could discriminate against anyone it wanted to, and there’s a real argument that the interstate highway system is unconstitutional. The federal prison system and criminal law would be in serious question, and forget the Federal Reserve. It would be gone.”

In the end, however, many liberal scholars believe that if the court took seriously the text and history of the entire Constitution — including the 16th Amendment, authorizing the income tax, and the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote — then originalism should just as often lead to liberal as conservative results.

On issues like campaign finance, health care, financial reform and gender discrimination, these scholars say, taking the 20th-century amendments as seriously as those passed in the 18th and 19th centuries would guarantee a constitutional originalism that upheld modern visions of liberty and equality.

“I hope Scalia and Thomas succeed in making their colleagues care more about text and history,” said Douglas Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, which argues that originalism can favor progressive causes. “But if they’re honest in reading and considering these sources, it won’t always yield the results the Tea Party wants.”

Judge Roll Killed in Rep.Giffords Shooting

January 8, 2011January 8, 2011Matthew L.M. Fletcher3 Comments

Awful, awful news.

Article here and here.

Judge Roll had handled a case I had watched closely as a young attorney at Pascua, Pascua Yaqui Tribe v. Caywood.

ICT Coverage of BMG v. Chukchansi — Important Sovereign Immunity Case

January 7, 2011Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Here is the article.

And the case materials are here.

News Coverage of Proposal to Utilize Solar Energy as Indian Country Economic Development

January 7, 2011Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is the article. And a link to the law review article here.

An excerpt:

There are many ironies in the history of relations between the United States and its indigenous peoples, but one in particular may be a telling illustration of the distribution of power.

Flip on a light switch in any of the great cities of the Southwest, such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas or Phoenix, and much of the time the energy that creates the light will be coming from one of four massive coal-burning electrical plants located on or a few miles from Navajo Nation land in Arizona and New Mexico.

The plants are critically important employers for members of the Navajo and Hopi tribes, about 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

The irony is that as many as 20,000 Navajo and Hopi families, surrounded on the south, east and west by power plants that deliver electricity to brightly lit cities hundreds of miles away, don’t have access to the electricity grid themselves.

Seven decades after the Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity to the rural South, a significant population in the U.S. – estimated at 14 percent of Indian homes on U.S. reservations – has yet to experience a crucial advantage of 20th-century life.

Ryan Dreveskracht believes that solar power may be a way to change that.

OP/Ed on Asian Carp Debacle

January 7, 2011Matthew L.M. Fletcher

An excerpt from the Traverse City Record Eagle:

It has become abundantly clear that until some kid with a fishing pole can stand on a breakwater in Frankfort and haul in a 100-pound Asian carp (or maybe get hauled in himself) the federal government will continue to deny the big fish have gotten into Lake Michigan.

That may be a bit of an exaggeration — they might cede the claim if some guy in a rowboat off Chicago hauls one in first — but the point is the same: Money trumps everything, including common sense, appeals to protect the environment, expert opinion and, of course, science.