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A growing body of international legal principles recognizes the right of indigenous people to water resources as a key component of their rights to self-determination, land, and economic self-sufficiency. These legal norms impose obligations on states both to recognize this right and to take affirmative steps to allow indigenous people to realize it. While the United States has not formally...

Criminal jurisdiction in Indian country is defined by a central, ironic paradox. Recent federal laws expanding tribal criminal jurisdiction are, in many respects, enormous victories for Indian country, as they acknowledge and reify a more robust notion of tribal sovereignty, one capable of accommodating increased tribal control over safety and security on Indian reservations. At the same time...

The boundaries of modern tribal criminal jurisdiction are defined by a handful of clear rules—such as a limit on sentence length and a categorical prohibition against prosecuting most non-Indians—and many grey areas in which neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has specifically addressed a particular question. This Article discusses five of the grey areas: whether tribes retain concurrent...

This Article explores the dynamics of U.S. citizenship and indigenous self-determination to see whether, and how, the two concepts are in tension and how they can be reconciled. The Article explores the four historical frames of citizenship for indigenous peoples within the United States—treating indigenous peoples as citizens of separate nations, as wards of the federal government, as American...

In June 2016, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Bryant that uncounseled tribal court convictions could serve as predicate offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 117(a). Citing the public safety crisis in Indian country, the limitations of tribal court sentencing, and the legislative history of Section 117(a), the Court upheld the federal statute enacted to address domestic violence offender...