Tiring of 'rolling the rock,' federal appeals court removes judge in 'Sisyphus'-like litigation
A federal appeals court has removed the judge in a 41-year-old Utah case over tribal boundaries in an opinion that begins with a reference to Sisyphus.
The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals removed 89-year-old U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins from the case in an Aug. 9 decision (PDF), the National Law Journal (sub. req.) reports.
The appeals court opinion by Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch said there was no finding of bias by the judge, but he “has given us little reason to hope that things might change on remand or that this long lingering dispute will soon find the finality it requires.”
The appeals court had ruled for the Ute Indian Tribe in the property boundaries dispute in an en banc opinion in 1985. The appeal court modified its ruling “in one respect” in 1997 after state litigation on the issues and a U.S. Supreme Court appeal, while stressing that other aspects of its decision remained, according to the appeals court’s latest opinion.
“We’re beginning to think we have an inkling of Sisyphus’s fate,” the court said in the first sentence of the opinion. “Courts of law exist to resolve disputes so that both sides might move on with their lives. Yet here we are, 40 years in, issuing our seventh opinion in the Ute line and still addressing the same arguments we have addressed so many times before. … Over the last 40 years the questions haven’t changed—and neither have our answers. We just keep rolling the rock.”
