The foundation of the modern corporation is built upon the separation of labor and capital. These entities were anathema to most Indigenous peoples when the Virginia Company was chartered in 1606 for the purpose of settling American lands. Over centuries of colonization federal law worked to assimilate Native Americans. Tribes were encouraged, even forced, to create their own corporate entities. Indelibly, consistent with their inherent sovereignty, Indigenous groups fused autochthonous legal principles into these corporate structures. Today, in the shadow of the #BLM movement and societal demands that corporations become more responsive to their communities and to the environment, shareholder primacy has reached its nadir. As corporate governance seeks to replace it with something stakeholder centered autochthonous principles gleaned from Indigenous corporations offer a way forward. These proposed reforms are as varied as the chthonic law they are built upon and range from making nature itself a corporate shareholder to issuing shares that gain voting rights only after they have been held to maturity.
Amici curiae are 25 scholars who teach, write, and/or practice in the area of federal Indian law and federal Indian policy. The amici are concerned with the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision in United States v. Cooley, 919 F.3d 1135 (9th Cir. 2019). There, the circuit court held that tribal police officers lack authority to briefly detain and search a non-Indian on a public highway running through the Crow Reservation unless it is either “apparent” or “obvious” that the non-Indian has violated state or federal law. Under that theory, the court affirmed the district court’s decision to suppress drug and firearm evidence obtained from a non-Indian defendant by a tribal law enforcement officer.The amici urge the Supreme Court to reverse the Ninth Circuit decision as the circuit court’s legal theory contradicts the custom, tradition, and policy of policing, as well as the treaties between the United States and indigenous nations. This all demonstrates that the United States has long recognized tribal authority to detain and search non-Indians.
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Reviewed by: Law at Little Big Horn: Due Process Denied by Charles E. Wright Grant Christensen Law at Little Big Horn: Due Process Denied. By Charles E. Wright. Foreword by Gordon Morris Bakken. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2016. ix + 285 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth. Charles E. Wright's work breaks new ground in an otherwise crowded field of literature surrounding the actions of Custer at Little Big Horn by focusing the reader's attention upon the legal dimensions of military engagement with Indians at the end of the 19th century. The text begins with several chapters about Custer's background and training. These break no new ground and read more like a recitation of dates and facts with too little focus on providing a narrative or setting up the events that follow. Accordingly the thesis of the argument—that the due process rights of Plains Indians were violated by the US military's pursuit of Indians on land reserved by treaty for their use—is buried until the second quarter of the text. However, when Wright begins his actual narration of events leading up to, during, and following the battle at Little Big Horn, the prose becomes more focused and precise and a clear narrative is taken up with the goal of justifying his premise that the Plains Indians had their life, liberty, and property taken without the guarantees of due process granted by the Constitution. While a clear goal emerges, Wright's legal argument suffers at times from several criticisms. In places he conflates the violation of a treaty right (which is made with a tribe) with the violation of due process (which is guaranteed to individuals) without clearly indicating to the reader the difference between the two. Perhaps more importantly, Wright, in places, judges the actions of 1877 by the legal principles present in 2016. For example, he claims that President Grant was waging an unconstitutional and undeclared war against the Indians, and, while recognizing that Indians were not considered citizens in 1877, discusses the legal consequences of the battle as if they were able to exercise those rights. There is nothing wrong with this approach. An understanding of history through a modern lens can open new understandings and begin a process of reconciliation that is vital to both modern policy making as well as to historians. However, the text could benefit from Wright more clearly admitting that is what he is doing—thus allowing the reader to more critically engage his argument. For example, there is no record of American courts in 1877 declaring the Sioux wars unconstitutional nor was there uniform acceptance that the total war strategy imposed by the destruction of Indian property and the targeting of noncombatants, including Indian women and children, was considered an unconstitutional violation of their due process rights. In fact it is questionable whether, in 1877, American courts recognized that the due process clause extended to Indians at all. This approach is further muddled toward the end of the text when Wright uses both modern legal principles as well as military law and military practice from the period of 1877 to advance his central thesis. The legal arguments advanced by Wright's work are incredibly important, but the context in which they were made (judging the actions of 1877 both by the military standards in place at the time and by modern constitutional standards) could have been clearer and would have given the work additional credibility. Despite moments where the legal argument lacks clarity and precision, the general thrust of Wright's argument and the text in general has much to recommend it. In particular, Wright makes a meaningful contribution with his inclusion of many maps containing his own markings that make the narrative story of the events surrounding the battle at Little Big Horn easy to follow. He draws upon both common military practice and actual military directives in place in 1877 to make a compelling legal argument that Custer's actions at Little Big Horn should be considered unlawful both by the rules of engagement in place at the time and by modern standards. Whether or not the reader is ultimately...
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Abstract Mutations in the TP53 tumor suppressor gene occur in >80% of the triple-negative or basal-like breast cancer. To test whether neomorphic functions of specific TP53 missense mutations contribute to phenotypic heterogeneity, we characterized phenotypes of non-transformed MCF10A-derived cell lines expressing the ten most common missense mutant p53 proteins and observed a wide spectrum of phenotypic changes in cell survival, resistance to apoptosis and anoikis, cell migration, invasion and 3D mammosphere architecture. The p53 mutants R248W, R273C, R248Q, and Y220C are the most aggressive while G245S and Y234C are the least, which correlates with survival rates of basal-like breast cancer patients. Interestingly, a crucial amino acid difference at one position—R273C vs. R273H—has drastic changes on cellular phenotype. RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq analyses show distinct DNA binding properties of different p53 mutants, yielding heterogeneous transcriptomics profiles, and MD simulation provided structural basis of differential DNA binding of different p53 mutants. Integrative statistical and machine-learning-based pathway analysis on gene expression profiles with phenotype vectors across the mutant cell lines identifies quantitative association of multiple pathways including the Hippo/YAP/TAZ pathway with phenotypic aggressiveness. Further, comparative analyses of large transcriptomics datasets on breast cancer cell lines and tumors suggest that dysregulation of the Hippo/YAP/TAZ pathway plays a key role in driving the cellular phenotypes towards basal-like in the presence of more aggressive p53 mutants. Overall, our study describes distinct gain-of-function impacts on protein functions, transcriptional profiles, and cellular behaviors of different p53 missense mutants, which contribute to clinical phenotypic heterogeneity of triple-negative breast tumors.
The 2010 passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act will invest significantly more resources in tribal courts. As tribal courts expand, conflicts between sovereignties – tribal, state, and federal – are likely to occur with much greater frequency. Tribal court civil jurisdiction over non-Indians will be among the issues most frequently appealed into federal courts. I offer this piece to propose a new and novel solution; that tribal courts be extended civil jurisdiction in a piecemeal process that vests absolute tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians for those civil offenses over which tribes have the greatest interest. This article takes one of the most common jurisdictional questions, tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians in cases of trespass to land, and argues that a bright-line rule favoring tribal court jurisdiction in this instance is legally mandated, will pragmatically conserve judicial resources, and recognizes the broad tribal sovereignty recently reaffirmed by Congress.
This paper summarizes the topics and trends in Indian law confronted by courts in 2017. Designed as an update that will be useful to practitioners as well as scholars, the paper breaks the discussion down into more than forty topics and subtopics. For this paper, I tracked and read all 646 judicial opinions issued by state and federal courts that squarely decided questions of federal Indian law. From those cases I have distilled this update. Ideally the first in an annual collection.
The paper includes an empirical discussion of Indian law looking at which circuits and districts are presented with the most Indian law questions. It also examines what topics receive the most coverage providing a summary of more than 200 ICWA opinions as well as capturing obscure topics like the 4 cases decided on the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act. It captures important moments in Indian law like Justice Thomas dissenting from denial of cert. in a land into trust case but also highlights the return of Leonard Peltier to federal court.
I hope the user finds this comprehensive update a useful survey of Indian law in 2017.
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Among the most basic principles of our federal courts is that they are courts of limited jurisdiction, exercising only those powers delegated to them in Article III. In 1985 the Supreme Court inexplicably created an exception to this constitutional tenant, and unilaterally declared a plenary judicial power to review the exercise of an Indian tribe's inherent sovereign authority. This exception is unmoored from all other Supreme Court precedent outside Indian law, and unjustifiably assumes the judicial power in direct contrast to the Court's ordinarily thoughtful jurisprudence on Article III and deference to the separation of powers. This article concludes that the Supreme Court was wrong in 1985 when it assumed a plenary judicial power over Indian affairs. The consequences are profound, and suggest a reconceptualization of the entire field of Indian law. Canon creating cases like Oliphant, Montana, and Cabazon should never have been decided because the exercise of a tribe's inherent authority does not create a federal question conferring subject matter jurisdiction on the federal courts. The inherent power of Indian tribes to criminally prosecute or civilly regulate non-Indians in Indian country should not subject them to the judicially imposed limits set by the Supreme Court, because the Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to decide those cases. Until a treaty or statute creates an affirmative basis for federal court review, an Indian tribe's inherent powers are subject to the checks and balances imposed by tribal government and no others.
