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Indigenous, Indian, and Aboriginal Law

Tribal sovereignty

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

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The Stories We Tell, And Have Told, About Tribal Sovereignty: Legal Fictions At Their Most Pernicious, Hope M. Babcock Jan 2010

The Stories We Tell, And Have Told, About Tribal Sovereignty: Legal Fictions At Their Most Pernicious, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Starting with Chief Justice John Marshall and continuing through to the present Supreme Court, the story of Indian sovereignty has been consistent—it exists only in the most diminished form. Some reasons for this have been premised on the incapacity of Indians to self-govern; others on theories of federalism; while still others on the ambitions of non-Indians. However, the factual premises behind the concept of diminished sovereignty are baseless—legal fictions about the conquest of Indians and their nature. These fictions originated in Chief Justice Marshall’s Indian Law Trilogy and should have vanished long ago when their original purposes were fulfilled, like …


A Civic-Republican Vision Of "Domestic Dependent Nations" In The Twenty-First Century: Tribal Sovereignty Re-Envisioned, Reinvigorated, And Re-Empowered, Hope M. Babcock Jan 2005

A Civic-Republican Vision Of "Domestic Dependent Nations" In The Twenty-First Century: Tribal Sovereignty Re-Envisioned, Reinvigorated, And Re-Empowered, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As a cure for what ails democracy in a pluralistic modem society, such as ours, Michael Sandel recommends "dispersing" sovereignty to a "multiplicity of [civic republican] communities--some more, some less extensive than nations." He intimates that doing this "may entail according greater cultural and political autonomy to subnational communities," which, in turn might "ease the strife that arises when state sovereignty is an all-or-nothing affair, absolute and indivisible, the only meaningful form of self-determination." He sees in federalism not just a "theory of intergovernmental relations," but a "political vision" that "self-government works best when sovereignty is dispersed and citizenship formed …