Law Commons^™

Nature’S Rights, Christiana Ochoa

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Do forests and rivers possess standing to sue? Do mountain ranges have substantive rights? A recent issue of The Judges’ Journal, a preeminent publication for American judges, alerts the bench, bar, and policymakers to the rapidly emerging “rights of nature,” predicting that state and federal courts will increasingly see claims asserting such rights. Within the United States, Tribal law has begun to legally recognize the rights of rivers, mountains, and other natural features. Several municipalities across the United States have also acted to recognize the rights of nature. United States courts have not yet addressed the issue, though in 2017, …

The Enemy Is The Knife: Native Americans, Medical Genocide, And The Prohibition Of Nonconsensual Sterilizations, Sophia Shepherd

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article describes the legal history of how, twenty years after the sterilizations began, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in 1978, finally created regulations that prohibited the sterilizations. It tells the heroic story of Connie Redbird Uri, a Native American physician and lawyer, who discovered the secret program of government sterilizations, and created a movement that pressured the government to codify provisions that ended the program. It discusses the shocking revelation by several Tribal Nations that doctors at the IHS hospitals had sterilized at least 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age around the country. …

White Tape And Indian Wards: Removing The Federal Bureaucracy To Empower Tribal Economies And Self-Government, Adam Crepelle

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

American Indians have the highest poverty rate in the United States, and dire poverty ensnares many reservations. With no private sector and abysmal infrastructure, reservations are frequently likened to third-world countries. Present-day Indian poverty is a direct consequence of present-day federal Indian law and policy. Two-hundred-year-old laws premised on Indian incompetency remain a part of the U.S. legal system; accordingly, Indian country is bound by heaps of federal regulations that apply nowhere else in the United States. The federal regulatory structure impedes tribal economic development and prevents tribes from controlling their own resources.

This Article asserts the federal regulatory “white …

Predicting Supreme Court Behavior In Indian Law Cases, Grant Christensen

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This piece builds upon Matthew Fletcher’s call for additional empirical work in Indian law by creating a new dataset of Indian law opinions. The piece takes every Indian law case decided by the Supreme Court from the beginning of the Warren Court until the end of the 2019-2020 term. The scholarship first produces an Indian law scorecard that measures how often each Justice voted for the “pro- Indian” outcome. It then compares those results to the Justice’s political ideology to suggest that while there is a general trend that a more “liberal” Justice is more likely to favor the pro-Indian …