Planning for Disability Book
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Rebecca C. Morgan, Planning for Disability (BNA, 2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Rebecca C. Morgan, Planning for Disability (BNA, 2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Grant Christensen, Predicting Supreme Court Behavior in Indian Law Cases (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This piece builds upon Matthew Fletcher’s call for additional empirical work in Indian law by creating a new dataset of Indian law opinions. The piece takes every Indian law case decided by the Supreme Court from the beginning of the Warren Court until the end of the 2019-2020 term. The scholarship first produces an Indian law scorecard that measures how often each Justice voted for the “pro-Indian” outcome. It then compares those results to the Justice’s political ideology to suggest that while there is a general trend that a more “liberal” justice is more likely to favor the pro-Indian interest, that trend is generally weak with considerable variance from justice to justice. Finally, the article then creates a logistic regression model in order to try to predict whether a pro-Indian outcome is likely to prevail at the Court. It finds six potential variables to be statistically significant. It uses quantitative analysis to prove that the Indian interest is more likely to prevail when the Tribe is the appellant, when the issue is framed as a jurisdictional contest, and when the case arises from certain regions of the country. It suggests that Indian law advocates may use these insights to help influence litigation strategies in the future.
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Grant Christensen, The Wrongful Death of an Indian: A Tribe’s Right to Object to the Death Penalty, 68 UCLA L. Rev. Discourse 404 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This Essay responds to the execution of Lezmond Mitchell, the only American Indian on federal death row. The execution was carried out on August 26, 2020 over the objection of both members of the victims’ family and the Navajo Nation. This Essay takes the clear position that because the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 requires tribal consent to seek the death penalty for murder, or felony murder predicted on robbery or kidnapping, that tribal consent should also have been required before the United States sought the death penalty in a carjacking case. The interpretation by the Ninth Circuit and the decision by the Executive to proceed with the execution undermine tribal sovereignty and are contrary to both congressional intent and statutory interpretation.
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Louis J. Virelli and David S. Rubenstein, Supreme Court News, 45 Administrative & Regulatory Law News 23 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.