Law Commons^™

Lawyering The Indian Child Welfare Act, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Wenona T. Singel

Michigan Law Review

This Article describes how the statutory structure of child welfare laws enables lawyers and courts to exploit deep-seated stereotypes about American Indian people rooted in systemic racism to undermine the enforcement of the rights of Indian families and tribes. Even when Indian custodians and tribes are able to protect their rights in court, their adversaries use those same advantages on appeal to attack the constitutional validity of the law. The primary goal of this Article is to help expose those structural issues and the ethically troublesome practices of adoption attorneys as the most important Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) case …

Testimony Before The Commission On Native Children, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Other Publications

This letter and powerpoint were prepared at the request of the Alyce Spotted Bear and Walter Soboleff Commission on Native Children in advance of a hearing on jurisdictional issues related to the Indian Child Welfare Act. I make several recommendations:

The Commission should recommend that Congress amend ICWA to provide for effective enforcement mechanisms. Those amendments could include (1) the establishment of express rights to bring interlocutory appellate court actions at more key points in state court child welfare matters, (2) the availability of attorney fees awards for Indian parents and Indian tribes in the event that a state or …

Preemption, Commandeering, And The Indian Child Welfare Act, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Randall F. Khalil

Articles

This year (2022), the Supreme Court agreed to review wide-ranging constitutional challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) brought by the State of Texas and three non-Indian foster families in the October 2022 Term. The Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, held that certain provisions of ICWA violated the anti-commandeering principle implied in the Tenth Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

We argue that the anti-commandeering challenges against ICWA are unfounded because all provisions of ICWA provide a set of legal standards to be applied in states which validly and expressly preempt state …