NYTs on Cobell Litigation

From the NYTs:

February 1, 2008
Editorial

The Verdict: It’s Broken

The case of the mismanaged American Indian trust funds is Dickensian both in length — now 11 years before the courts — and inequity. On Wednesday, Judge James Robertson of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Interior Department had “unreasonably delayed” its accounting for billions of dollars owed to American Indian landholders and that the agency “cannot remedy the breach.”

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Fletcher Op/Ed on the Off-Reservation Market

From Indian Country Today:

Tribes’ economic plans stifled by policy

© Indian Country Today February 01, 2008. All Rights Reserved

Posted: February 01, 2008 by: Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The region where the city of Detroit now rests used to be, centuries ago, a major trading market for the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples and others. A permanent community of Indian people from all around lived in the vicinity and thrived off of the marketplace, while most Indians who traded there would travel to the market periodically from their homelands. There are places like this all over North America, such as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

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ICT Editorial on Cert Pool Memos & Indian Law

You can read my newest Indian Country Today editorial here or here.

Here’s the text:

Each year, the U.S. Supreme Court chooses which appeals it wishes to decide. In most years, the court decides to hear fewer than 80 cases out of several thousand appeals. These usually include cases in which there is a split of authority in lower courts (often called a ”circuit split,” referencing the 13 federal circuit courts of appeals), cases in which a lower court has committed a gross error or cases in which there is a critical constitutional issue at stake. Cases in which there is no split, cases that will affect only a few people, cases involving simple correction of a minor lower court error or cases involving an unimportant issue are unlikely to be heard by the court.

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