The film Killers of the Flower Moon “underscores the critical importance of the rule of law and the pursuit of justice,” said ABA President Mary Smith, who interviewed director Martin Scorsese and Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear of the Osage Nation in the latest installment of the ABA Presidential Speaker Series.
President Joe Biden told reporters Thursday that he doesn’t think that a border wall is effective, but he is planning to build one anyway in Starr County, Texas.
The United States has a long and despicable history of removing Native American children from their families. As Justice Neil Gorsuch observed, “there was mass removal of Indian children from their families during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by state officials and private parties.” This horrific practice actually began almost 150 years ago.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a federal law giving preferences to tribes in Native American adoptions but left consideration of challengers’ equal protection argument for a future case in which plaintiffs have standing to raise it.
Judge Abby Abinanti was the first tribal woman to be admitted to the State Bar of California. For almost two decades, she served as a judicial officer for the San Francisco Superior Court, and Abinanti has been a Yurok tribal court judge since 1997.
Feel like curling up next to the fireplace with a good read? ABA Journal Managing Editor Kevin Davis has curated a selection of our favorite feature stories that ran in the magazine and online in 2022.
The Indian Child Welfare Act faces a broad, multipronged legal attack led by the state of Texas, which along with seven individuals sued the federal government challenging various provisions of ICWA as unconstitutional. The most attention-getting is the attack on the law’s preferences for placing Native American children with family members or other tribe members.
Last year’s term was momentous: The court overruled Roe v. Wade, greatly expanded gun rights and aggressively protected free exercise of religion. There is no doubt that the coming term, too, will be filled with blockbuster decisions.
The ABA has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act, writing in an amicus brief filed Thursday that Congress enacted the statute “under valid constitutional authority and on the basis of an extensive body of evidence and law.”
One of the most important themes of the recently completed Supreme Court term is the significance of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg being replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. An important example of how this has affected court rulings came in a case in the area of Indian law that, by comparison, received little media attention.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that Oklahoma has the authority to prosecute crimes by non-Indians against Native Americans on reservations. The decision limits the reach of a prior decision that barred the state from prosecuting tribal members on reservations.
When researchers began the painstaking work of identifying Indigenous children who died at the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School in Nebraska, they kept making chilling discoveries.
A lawyer explains how her work informed the writing of her book and why many Indigenous people still feel the impact of the Canadian school system to this day.
In July 2020 when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch read the majority opinion in McGirt v. Oklahoma, Assistant U.S. Attorney Shannon Cozzoni sprang into action. In that moment, she knew what would happen next: Scores of major crime cases would be landing in her federal court district in Tulsa, requiring rapid adjustments and recalibration.
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