Here:
Question presented:
Whether Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 19 requires dismissal of an action challenging a federal agency’s use of water subject to state-adjudicated water rights if a Native American tribe asserts an interest in the suit and does not consent to joinder.
Lower court materials here.
Kirsten Matoy Carlson has published “The Democratic Difficulties of Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta” in New Political Science. Here is the abstract:
The Supreme Court, some commentators argue, is at its most undemocratic since the Lochner Era in the 1930s. They point to the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which departs from public opinion on abortion and longstanding constitutional precedence. Dobbs, however, is not an outlier. The Supreme Court made a similar move in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta. The majority opinion questioned almost 200 years of constitutional interpretation and several decades of congressional policy to enable state governments to exercise criminal authority over non-Indians in Indian Country. This article compares the majority opinion in Castro-Huerta to congressional policy to explore the democratic and constitutional difficulties that can arise when the Supreme Court refuses to defer to Congress—the democratically elected and constitutionally appointed institution for making federal Indian policy. It reveals how the Court’s undemocratic turn extends beyond cases involving individual rights.
Stacy Leeds, Robert J. Miller, Kevin K. Washburn, and Derrick Beetso have posted “Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta — Rebalancing Federal-State-Tribal Power,” previously published in the Journal of Appellate Process and Practice, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The Supreme Court’s unexpected decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta in 2022 overturned established precedent and scrambled long-settled expectations about the division of criminal jurisdiction in Indian country. In this panel discussion shortly after the decision was issued, the authors provided a “hot take” on the Castro-Huerta decision and discussed its impact on criminal justice in Indian country and on federal Indian law more broadly.
We previously posted this symposium issue here.
Gregory Ablavsky has posted “Too Much History: Castro Huerta and the Problem of Change in Indian Law,” forthcoming in the Supreme Court Review, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The Supreme Court’s decision last Term in Castro-Huerta v. Oklahoma dramatically rewrote the rules of criminal jurisdiction in federal Indian law. For the first time since 1882, the Court judicially expanded the scope of state criminal jurisdiction in Indian country, finding that states hold jurisdiction over Indian-on-non-Indian crime concurrently with the federal government. In reaching this conclusion, the Court exemplified the subjectivism that scholars have criticized in the Court’s Indian law jurisprudence for decades. The opinion distinguished or cast aside at least six prior decisions where the Court had seemingly reached the opposite conclusion, as well as concluding that the Court had already substantially limited the Court’s foundational holding in Worcester v. Georgia (1833) that Indian country ordinarily lies outside state authority.
Building on these earlier critiques, this Article uses Castro-Huerta to examine a less explored flaw in the Court’s Indian law rulings—what I call the problem of “too much history.” In Indian law, judges and litigants must make sense of over two centuries of jurisdictional debates, recorded largely not in statutes or constitutional provisions but in dozens of shifting Supreme Court decisions. The key question in Castro-Huerta, and the core of the dispute between majority and dissent, was change–how the law on state jurisdiction in Indian country had shifted over time. But the sheer mass of history makes it hard for the Justices to identify legitimate legal change in Indian law.
This conundrum leads to two broad types of judicial use of history in Indian law. “Good” history decisions, epitomized by this Term’s decision in Ysleta del Sur Pueblo v. Texas, employ specific context to examine narrowly defined legal questions. By contrast, “bad” history opinions, exemplified by Castro-Huerta, turn to the past as an independent source of law, ask broad, unanswerable questions of it, and provide no clear way to assess the inevitable heap of conflicting evidence.
Having laid out this challenge, the Article reexamines the question of the specific historical change at the core at Castro-Huerta. Rather than the majority’s narrative of abandonment and the dissent’s narrative of continuity, I think a more accurate account of what the Court has done with respect to state jurisdiction in Indian country is translation—trying to make sense of older legal principles within a new jurisprudential frame. But this approach makes the Court’s decisions in this area especially prone to misreading and selective citation, as Castro-Huerta underscored.
Here.
Here is “Justices appear divided over Navajo Nation’s water rights.”
Background materials on the case are here.
Here is today’s order list.
The denied petition is Sulgrove v. Spokane Indian Tribe.
Lower court materials here.
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