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Native American Law

B770 is taught by E. Fletcher, D. Williams

This course will examine the legal framework for Indian tribal self-government in the United States the most important instance of cultural federalism in our legal system. The course will examine the general practice of cultural federalism from a constitutional design perspective to lay a foundation for considering Indian Law. It will then examine the materials of Indian Law from the perspective of narrative theory: as a story of the country, of individual tribes, and of individual cases, and the meaning that we make from those stories. Finally, the course will consider the difficulty in developing an over-arching normative framework for governing the interaction of different cultures with different values. Each student will write a number of short papers which, combined, will form a larger project. The subject of the papers will be determined by consultation between each student and the instructor, but the default option will be for individual students to apply the frameworks from the class in a comparative way to the stories of particular Indian tribes or to particular indigenous groups abroad.