Law Commons^™

Recentering Tribal Criminal Jurisdiction, Addie C. Rolnick

Scholarly Works

The boundaries of modern tribal criminal jurisdiction are defined by a handful of clear rules—such as a limit on sentence length and a categorical prohibition against prosecuting most non-Indians—and many grey areas in which neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has specifically addressed a particular question. This Article discusses five of the grey areas: whether tribes retain concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute major crimes, whether tribes affected by Public Law 280 retain concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute a full range of crimes, whether tribes may prosecute Indians who are not citizens of any tribe, whether tribes may prosecute their own citizens for …

A Post-Carcieri Vocabulary Exercise: What If "Now" Really Means "Then"?, Heidi M. Staudenmaier, Ruth K. Khalsa

UNLV Gaming Law Journal

When the Indian Reorganization Act1 (“IRA”) was passed in 1934, it officially defined an “Indian” as a member of a recognized tribe “now under federal jurisdiction.” For nearly three-quarters of a century, this definition of an Indian and an Indian tribe — hallmarked by the four-word phrase “now under federal jurisdiction” — guided federal policy and agency action on a host of matters, including management of federal lands, land-into-trust acquisitions made on behalf of tribes, and — after 1988 — application of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (“IGRA”).

In February 2009, however, the United States Supreme Court upended seventy-five years …