In 2014 the United States Supreme Court added two new cases to the canon on the meaning of due process in the context of personal jurisdiction. These cases clarified the metes and bounds of specific and general personal jurisdiction. However, decisions that fit within the state and federal court system do not always easily have cross applications to tribal courts – which nonetheless are obliged to extend due process rights via the Indian Civil Rights Act. This article takes the Supreme Court’s 2014 decisions and discusses their potential application to tribal courts and their use within Indian Country.

The Model Tribal Secured Transactions Act was recently proposed by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. This article takes the position that the model act, if adopted, will encourage economic development in Indian Country by creating a set of uniform rules which both non-Indians and Indians can utilize to promote lending. Critically – before it is widely adopted, this article implores the NCCUSL to consider including in the model act – language that would protect tribal cultural property; and in the absence of such language, encourages tribes to modify the act to accomplish this protection. The stakes include the potential loss of priceless real and personal, tangible and intangible, cultural property which itself form the linchpin of both tribal identity and cultural expression for many indigenous communities in the United States and beyond.

The Global Financial Crisis precipitated a condensing of capital and a fall in global equities markets that resulted not solely in the necessity of government bailouts of the financial industry but also exposed a number of Ponzi schemes that collectively will cost investors tens of billions of dollars. With a new wave of litigation by innocent investors against Ponzi scheme operators just beginning, and likely to take years, it becomes important to clearly identify the methodologies used to value the loss and allocate existing assets among remaining creditors. To that end I offer this article to argue that courts ought to use a comparatively new approach – the loss to the losing victim methodology originally pioneered in criminal law – to determine how equally innocent victims share the losses these schemes precipitated. By standardizing the calculation of loss to investors in both criminal and civil law, the courts will not only make the determination of loss considerably easier, but also more equitable.

Scholars of the Supreme Court often use a justice’s political ideology to predict their ultimate vote on Constitutional questions. While this approach may serve scholars well when questions involve hot button civil liberties issues that are the focus of confirmation hearings, ideology is in actuality a poor predictor of judicial behavior in other areas of law. This paper looks at one of the more complex – Federal Indian Law – and uses both descriptive statistics and more advanced quantitative analysis to go beyond the pure ideology and explain why individual Justices vote the way they do. Using the Fisher Exact Test, and a comprehensive new database of Indian Law decisions, I demonstrate that contrary to common expectations, factors like the Solicitor General’s participation are not significant in swaying an individual Justice’s vote, while factors like being the appellant party and certified questions of conflicting jurisdiction do statistically significantly alter an individual Justice’s vote on the merits. These factors provide better insight into the ultimate outcome – at a Justice level – of Indian law decisions before the Court, and can be used by parties to predict future Supreme Court outcomes on Indian law questions.

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.