Scholarship

Christiana Ochoa on the Rights of Nature

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Christiana Ochoa has posted “Nature’s Rights,” forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law, on SSRN.

The abstract:

Do forests and rivers possess standing to sue? Do mountain ranges have substantive rights? A recent issue of The Judges’ Journal, a preeminent publication for American judges, alerts the bench, bar, and policymakers to the rapidly emerging “rights of nature,” predicting that state and federal courts will increasingly see claims asserting such rights. Within the United States, Tribal law has begun to legally recognize the rights of rivers, mountains, and other natural features. Several municipalities across the United States have also acted to recognize the rights of nature. United States courts have not yet addressed the issue, though in 2017, a Colorado District Court dismissed a suit claiming rights for the Colorado River ecosystem. Meanwhile, fourteen foreign countries have extended standing and substantive rights to nature, and that number is growing quickly. This international trend matters because U.S. Supreme Court Justices, including Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, have argued that American courts should note and address cutting-edge legal developments in foreign jurisdictions.

This Article provides the key foundational and theoretical basis for recognizing the rights of nature. It explores the intellectual and precedential basis for accepting nature’s rights, surveying developments in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and providing the only comprehensive survey of all legal systems that currently recognize such rights. It traces the geographic, theoretical, and practical development of the idea of nature’s rights, illustrating that human thought regarding the intrinsic value and rights of nature has evolved significantly since our common law on the issue was established. This Article thus provides the intellectual, moral, and philosophical grounding for students, clerks, judges, and lawmakers facing questions about extending rights to nature.

Interesting New Scholarship on Cultural Linguistics and Treaty Language

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Sammy Matsaw, Dylan Nicely-Hedden, and Barbara A. Cosens have posted “Cultural Linguistics and Treaty Language: A Modernized Approach to Interpreting Treaty Language to Capture the Tribe’s Understanding“, forthcoming in Environmental Law, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Language is a reflection of a thought world. A worldview that has been shaped by place to describe one’s identity in space and time does not equate to species relatedness as a default to know one another. In the legal system of the United States, there is acknowledgement of treaties in colonized lands that there are rights granted from the tribes and not to them, and those rights are landbased. Yet, the Indigenous voice is dead before arrival, before it enters the room of science, justice, academe, or otherwise. The exclusion of Indigenous peoples at the table of knowledge and from the power to make decisions within their homelands has proven a detriment to the land, waterways, flora and fauna, and human beings. Nowhere would tribal peoples have agreed to our own destruction, it is and has been a forced hand. This Article explores the changing interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court canon to construe treaties with Native American tribes as the tribe would have understood them, and why mere translation of Native language to English fails to capture a Native understanding. Through the juxtaposition of western legal analysis and the powerful voice of a Native scientist, this Article illustrates how difficult and yet how necessary it will be to bridge that divide if this powerful western nation is to fulfill its sacred promises to Native people. As a contribution to the Issue on the fiftieth anniversary of United States v. Oregon, this Article looks to the future of federal jurisprudence on the interpretation of treaties with American Indians and envisions one in which reconciliation through an understanding of different worldviews is possible.

Grant Christensen on Predicting Supreme Court Behavior in Indian Law Cases

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Grant Christensen has published “Predicting Supreme Court Behavior in Indian Law Cases” in the Michigan Journal Race & Law. Here is the abstract:

This piece builds upon Matthew Fletcher’s call for additional empirical work in Indian law by creating a new dataset of Indian law opinions. The piece takes every Indian law case decided by the Supreme Court from the beginning of the Warren Court until the end of the 2019-2020 term. The scholarship first produces an Indian law scorecard that measures how often each Justice voted for the “pro- Indian” outcome. It then compares those results to the Justice’s political ideology to suggest that while there is a general trend that a more “liberal” Justice is more likely to favor the pro-Indian interest, that trend is generally weak with considerable variance from Justice to Justice. Finally, the article then creates a logistic regression model in order to try to predict whether a pro-Indian outcome is likely to prevail at the Court. It finds six potential variables to be statistically significant. It uses quantitative analysis to prove that the Indian interest is more likely to prevail when the Tribe is the appellant, when the issue is framed as a jurisdictional contest, and when the case arises from certain regions of the country. It suggests that Indian law advocates may use these insights to help influence litigation strategies in the future.

Recommended, not only because MJRL is a premier journal.

Dylan Hedden-Nicely and Stacy Leeds on McGirt and the Future of Federal Indian Law

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Dylan Hedden-Nicely and Stacy Leeds have posted “A Familiar Crossroads: McGirt v. Oklahoma and the Future of the Federal Indian Law Canon” on SSRN. The paper is forthcoming in the New Mexico Law Review.

The abstract:

Federal Indian law forms part of the bedrock of American jurisprudence. Indeed, critical parts of the pre-civil war constitutional canon were defined in federal Indian law cases that simultaneously provided legal justification for American westward expansion onto unceded Indian lands. As a result, federal Indian law makes up an inextricable part of American rule of law. Despite its importance, federal Indian law follows a long and circuitous road that requires “wander[ing] the maze of Indian statutes and case law tracing back [over] 100 years.” That road has long oscillated between two poles, with the Supreme Court sometimes applying foundational principles that view tribes as sovereigns “retaining all their original natural rights,” and at other times treating tribes as mere “wards subject to a [self-imposed] guardian.”

Supreme Court respect for tribal sovereignty and self-determination reached its zenith in the so-called “modern era” of federal Indian law, spanning from 1959 through the late 1970s. During this era, the Court tended to adhere to federal Indian jurisprudence and solidified a relatively coherent doctrine based upon the foundational principles developed in the 1830s. The late Dean David Getches described the modern era as a time that “encouraged a reinvigoration of tribal governments throughout the country. During this period, tribes gained political influence and economic security as [the federal government] generally promoted a policy of tribal self-determination.”

The Court turned away from its foundational Indian law principles with the onset of the 1980s and the departure intensified as Chief Justice William Rehnquist was appointed chief justice in 1986. Since then, the touchstone of the Supreme Court’s federal Indian jurisprudence has been to employ a “subjectivist” approach whereby it “gauges tribal sovereignty as a function of changing conditions”—demographic, social, political, and economic—and the expectations of non-Indians that may be potentially by the exercise of tribal power. As a result, the Supreme Court became a strikingly hostile place for American Indian tribes as the Court became increasingly willing to divest tribes of governmental powers, not by upholding the enactments of Congress, but through its own interpretation of what tribal inherent governmental rights ought to be.

The appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor and, more recently, Justice Neil Gorsuch seems to have brought change to the Court’s direction in Indian law cases. Since then, cases have been consistently decided in favor of tribal litigants by reaffirming treaty rights through the application of foundational principles that focus on the plain language of treaties and the application of the Indian canons of construction. However, to be sure, even the Rehnquist Court did “recite[] and sometimes act[] upon foundation principles,” but those cases were limited to situations where “non-Indian interests [were] not seriously threatened.” All of Indian Country waited for, or perhaps dreaded, a true litmus test.

That test came to the Supreme Court in the form of two Indian law cases—Sharp v. Murphy and McGirt v. Oklahoma—both of which were framed by non-Indian parties to affect the interests of an estimated 1.8 million people in eastern half Oklahoma. Ready or not, Indian Country found its test case, which squarely placed the Court’s competing jurisprudential philosophies— its foundation principles versus its “subjectivist” approach—on a collision course.

In a powerful and uncharacteristically passionate decision, Justice Gorsuch wrote for a 5-4 majority, upholding treaty-based rights to re-recognize the historic reservation boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the fourth largest Indigenous nation in the United States. The decision was the fourth consecutive treaty-rights victory and seemed to solidify a shift toward a consistent approach rooted in foundational principles.

The victory was short-lived. Just weeks after the Court’s decision in McGirt, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, once again shifting the make-up of the United States Supreme Court. As a result, Federal Indian law once again finds itself at a crossroads. The Murphy and McGirt decisions are landmark decisions that bring change to the legal landscape of much of Oklahoma. It remains to be seen whether the perceived new Supreme Court era in Indian law is here to stay.

Highly recommended!!!

Angelique EagleWoman on Tribal Court Authority

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Angelique EagleWoman has published “Jurisprudence and Recommendations for Tribal Court Authority Due to Imposition of U.S. Limitations” in the William Mitchell Law Review.

Harvard Law Review Note on Wisconsin Oneida’s Reservation Boundaries Case Win in the Seventh Circuit

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here.

Here is our post on that case.

Trevor Reed on Indigenous Dignity and the Right to be Forgotten

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Trevor Reed has posted “Indigenous Dignity and the Right to be Forgotten,” forthcoming in the BYU Law Review, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Indigenous cultural documentation amassed over more than two centuries currently occupies the shelves and databases of American museums, universities, archives and other institutions. Field notes, photographs, sound recordings, maps, kinship charts, and all manner of other cultural materials collected from Tribal members constitutes what is perhaps America’s first instance of “big data.” While often touted by collectors and institutions as rich historical and cultural resources, I argue that some of these collections have become toxic in their preserved forms, separated from their communities’ modes of care. These materials are among those that Indigenous groups should have the right to remove from settler archives, museums, digital repositories, and other institutions and if necessary, erase, delete, or destroy. The kind of Indigenous right to erase sensitive cultural material held by settler institutions, the contours of which I begin to etch out in this symposium essay, is not unlike the right to be forgotten and other data privacy rights already adopted by the European Union, and to some extent, the State of California. While much of the debate surrounding the right to be forgotten in the United States has focused on tensions between personal autonomy and the right of the public to be informed, the collective rights of Indigenous peoples to maintain cultural dignity and sovereignty in the wake of colonization, I argue, provides a compelling case for recognizing an Indigenous right to be forgotten.

Tribal Law Journal Volume 20

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here:

PDF

Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez in the Evolution of Federal Law
Richard B. Collins

PDF

Tribal Justice: Honoring Indigenous Dispute Resolution (Symposium Keynote Address)
Deb Haaland

PDF

Native American Oral Evidence: Finding a New Hearsay Exception
Max Virupaksha Katner

PDF

Tribal Opposition to Enbridge Line 5: Rights and Interests
John Minode’e Petoskey

Stephanie Hall Barclay & Michalyn Steele on Protections for Indigenous Sacred Sites

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Stephanie Hall Barclay & Michalyn Steele have published “Rethinking Protections for Indigenous Sacred Sites” in the Harvard Law Review. Here is the abstract:

Meaningful access to sacred sites is among the most important principles to the religious exercise of Indigenous peoples, yet tribes have been repeatedly thwarted by the federal government in their efforts to vindicate this practice of their religion. The colonial, state, and federal governments of this Nation have been desecrating and destroying Native American sacred sites since before the Republic was formed. Unfortunately, the callous destruction of Indigenous sacred sites is not just a troubling relic of the past. Rather, the threat to sacred sites and cultural resources continues today in the form of spoliation from development, as well as in the significant barriers to meaningful access Indigenous peoples face.

Scholars concerned about government failure to protect Indigenous sacred sites on government property have generally agreed that the problem stems from the unique nature of Indigenous spiritual traditions as being too distinct from non-Indigenous religious traditions familiar to courts and legislators, and therefore eluding protection afforded to other traditions. By contrast, this Article approaches the problem from an entirely different angle: we focus instead on the similarities between government coercion with respect to Indigenous religious exercise and other non-Indigenous religious practices. We illustrate how the debate about sacred sites unwittingly partakes in longstanding philosophical debates about the nature of coercion itself — a phenomenon that has previously gone unnoticed by scholars. This Article argues that whether or not one formally labels the government’s actions as “coercive,” the important question is whether the government is bringing to bear its sovereign power in a way that inhibits the important ideal of religious voluntarism — the ability of individuals to voluntarily practice their religious exercise consistent with their own free self-development. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of question courts ask when evaluating government burdens on non-Indigenous religious exercise. The failure to ask this same question about voluntarism for Indigenous religious practices has created a double standard, wherein the law recognizes a much more expansive notion of coercion for contexts impacting non-Indigenous religious practices, and a much narrower conception of coercion when it comes to Indigenous sacred sites.

This egregious double standard in the law ought to be revisited. Doing so would have two important implications. First, when government interference with religious voluntarism is viewed clearly, tribal members and Indigenous practitioners should be able to prove a prima facie case under statutes like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act much more easily. Second, this Article makes the novel claim that clearer understanding of the coercive control government exercises over sacred sites should animate a strong obligation under the government’s trust responsibility and plenary power doctrine to provide more — rather than less — robust protection of Indigenous sacred sites.

Govind Persad on Allocating Medicine Fairly in an Unfair Pandemic

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Govind Persad has posted “Allocating Medicine Fairly in an Unfair Pandemic,” forthcoming in the University of Illinois Law Review, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

America’s COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated and disparately harmed minority communities. In this Article, I focus on the pressing question of how the allocation of scarce treatments for COVID-19 and similar public health threats should respond to these racial disparities. Many policymakers and popular commentators have recognized that the inevitable initial scarcity of vaccines presents questions about racial disparity. Therapeutics like monoclonal antibodies raise similar questions, as do emergency interventions such as ventilators and ICU beds. Some have proposed that members of racial groups who have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic should receive priority for scarce treatments. Others have worried that this prioritization misidentifies racial disparities as reflecting biological differences rather than structural racism, or that it will generate mistrust among groups who have previously been harmed by medical research. Still others complain that such prioritization would be fundamentally unjust.

In Part II, I provide a brief overview of current and proposed COVID-19 treatments and identify documented or likely scarcities and disparities in access. In Part III, I argue that randomly allocating scarce medical interventions, as some propose, will not effectively address disparities: it both permits unnecessary deaths and concentrates those deaths among people who are more exposed to infection. In Part IV, I explain why using individual-level racial classifications in allocation is precluded by current Supreme Court precedent. Addressing disparities will require focusing on factors other than race, or potentially considering race at an aggregate rather than individual level. I also argue that policies prioritizing members of Native American tribes can succeed legally even where policies based on race would not. In Part V, I examine two complementary strategies to narrow racial disparities. One would prioritize individuals who live in disadvantaged geographic areas or work in hard-hit occupations, potentially alongside race-sensitive aggregate metrics like neighborhood segregation. These approaches, like the policies school districts adopted after the Supreme Court rejected individualized racial classifications in education, would narrow disparities without classifying individuals by race. The other strategy would address the starkly disparate racial impact of deaths early in life by limiting the use of policies that explicitly deprioritize the prevention of early deaths, and by considering policies that prioritize their prevention.