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The relationship between scholarly amicus briefs and scholarship

I much appreciated the guest-post by Prof. Lorianne Updike Toler (Northern Illinois) on Brackeen back in November, based on her recent University of Chicago Law Review article, The Missing Indian Affairs Clause; now that Brackeen has been handed down, I thought I'd pass along this follow-up: Halaand v. Brackeen, which…

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion for the Supreme Court in Haaland v. Brackeen is conservative in the good, old-fashioned sense of the word. In upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act, the court reaffirmed precedent and declined an invitation to revolutionize the law with a reactionary constitutional holding. Along the…

Worried about a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, some states aim to pass new laws ensuring American Indian children can stay in their tribal communities even if they’re placed in the child welfare system.

I was chatting with Prof. Lorianne Updike Toler (Northern Illinois), and she mentioned some thoughts of hers on this subject, based on her recent University of Chicago Law Review article, The Missing Indian Affairs Clause. I encouraged her to write up a blog post, and she kindly passed along the…

Well, you can't say that my new book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, was not well-timed. Last week, the Supreme Court took up the issue of affirmative action in admissions, and directly addressed the question raised in my book as to whether the classifications are too…

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the preferences Native American families and tribes are given under the Indian Child Welfare Act.

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices sounded sharply split Wednesday on whether to strike down a federal child custody law that seeks to keep Native American children with tribal families.

MINNEAPOLIS — Sheri Riemers, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, was 19 when she learned that two of her mother's sisters were removed from their birth home in the early 1970s and placed with separate non-Indian foster parents. One of the sisters was sexually abused and forcibly…