Conflicts in indigenous law: courts and federalism in the United States and common law nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of the complex and evolving relationship between common law nations and indigenous First Nations, who are neither fully integrated into the dominant social and political institutions nor entirely separate as sovereign political entities. We examine how the United States Supreme Court enabled the devolution of federal obligations to First Nations, which then catalyzed increasing federal delegation of indigenous affairs to states to generate these conflicts. We find that this devolution directly undermines indigenous sovereignty and pushes indigenous rights to state courts, which tend to view Indigenous Peoples as interest groups and associations rather than sovereign Nations. This combination ensures that that indigenous rights are rarely secured either politically or via litigation. We compare these trends to two other common law, federalist democracies with British colonial history: Australia and Canada. Changes in federal policy and federalist delegation of indigenous affairs vary dramatically across these three nations despite their similar colonial histories and approaches to indigenous affairs. In the United States, indigenous policy authority shifted from the federal government to the states, while the opposite trend emerges in Australia, where states had initial authority over indigenous affairs, which increasingly shifted to the (federal) Commonwealth. Finally, indigenous affairs in Canada have largely stayed within the authority of the federal government since colonization. Hence, these three cases aid our evaluation of how shifts of indigenous policy across federalist institutions affect court roles and indigenous rights protections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".