Law Commons^™

Tribal Court Praxis: One Year In The Life Of Twenty Tribal Courts, Nell Jessup Newton

Journal Articles

For a presentation, I read the eighty-five cases published in the Indian Law Reporter during 1996. I was struck by the diversity of the issues, the difficulty, complexity and subtlety of the choice of law, and other procedural and substantive issues addressed. I was most impressed by the richness of the dialogue in tribal court opinions—a dialogue between the court and the tribal councils, tribal people, and members of the bar. One may also read the opinions as initiating a conversation with the general public. A conversation requires listening, however.

In this article, I will bring to light the work …

Reconstituting Haudenosaunee Law, Sovereignty, And Governance, Errol E. Meidinger

Journal Articles

This article introduces a symposium issue on "Law, Sovereignty, and Tribal Governance: The Iroquois Confederacy" that grew out of a conference at the University at Buffalo Law School in 1998. The symposium was heavily attended and debated by the indigenous peoples of the region. The article argues that core lessons of the conference included the requirement to understand and implement sovereignty as tool of cultural survival, particularly in its insistence on a land base; that sovereignty has been adopted as a central concept by Indian peoples both because it provides a necessary social bulwark and because it facilitates a discursive …