Category: Indigenous Law
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The Puzzle of Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Preemption in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta
Carolina Pardo — In his concurring opinion in United States v. Lara (2004), Justice Thomas writes, “Federal Indian policy is, to say the least, schizophrenic.” Justice Thomas aptly characterized Federal Indian law as contradictory and inconsistent. Since Christopher Columbus stepped on the sands of the Bahamas in 1492, the relationship between Indigenous people and Western…
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Hypocrisy vs. Sovereignty: Accounting for the Colonial Vestiges of Public Law 83-280 in Alaska
Dane Lester — Over the past three hundred years, the United States has expanded from a series of British royalist colonies on America’s East Coast to a fully-fledged democratic nation taking up the third-largest land area of any country in the world. As a result of its conquest, the U.S. claimed jurisdiction over the land…