Tribal Courts
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Tribal Court Clearinghouse
Part of the Tribal Law and Policy Institute.
Includes Massey Mayo Case & Jill E. Tompkins, A Guide for Tribal Court Law Clerks and Judges (2007) (77-page PDF). -
National Tribal Judicial Center
Part of the National Judicial College. -
Tribal Courts Council
A free-standing committee of the American Bar Association's Judicial Division.
CFR Courts / Court of Indian Offenses
"CFR Courts" or the Court of Indian Offenses serve as the trial courts for some Oklahoma tribes that do not have their own justice systems. Appeals may be taken from the trial court to the Court of Indian Appeals.
Articles About Tribal Courts
Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Toward a Theory of Intertribal and Intratribal Common Law, 43 Hous. L. Rev. 701 (2006)
Rose Carmen Goldberg, No Tribal Court Is an Island? Citation Practices of the Tribal Judiciary, 3 Am. Indian L.J. 247 (2014) (analyzing 3-year sample of tribal court cases to see what precedents were cited).
Nell Jessup Newton, Tribal Court Praxis: One Year in the Life of Twenty Indian Tribal Courts, 22 Am. Indian L. Rev. 285 (1998)
April L. Wilkinson, Student Paper, A Framework for Understanding Tribal Courts and the Application of Fundamental Law: Trhough the Voices of Scholars in the Field of Tribal Justice, 15 Tribal L.J. 67 (2015)
William P. Zuger, A Baedeker to the Tribal Court, 83 N. Dak. L. Rev. 55 (2007) (Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Court)
Publication of Tribal Court Decisions
There is no comprehensive source for all tribal court decisions, either in print or online.
Some tribes post some or all of their decisions on their websites. See list at the Tribal Court Clearinghouse.
Some tribes publish their cases separately.
Selected tribal court decisions are published in the Indian Law Reporter.
Some tribes' cases are available in commercial databases, Casemaker, Lexis, Versuslaw, or Westlaw.
To find sources for a given tribe, use the National Indian Law Library's Tribal Law Gateway or use our chart below, under Compare Coverage.
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Tribal Court Opinion Indian Law Bulletin (NILL)
Hosted by the National Indian Law Library; compiled by the Colorado Law School American Indian Law Clinic.
Includes selected tribal court decisions 2016-date, with 39 cases 1980–2015.
Cases are selected from Casemaker, LexisNexis, Versuslaw, Westlaw, and selected tribal websites. Text from commercial databases is posted with permission of the vendors.
Cases are in the areas of commercial, criminal, employment, environmental, family, and property law.
Searches can use quotation marks (e.g., "domestic violence" protection) and or (e.g., attorney or lawyer or counsel).
Subscribe to the Bulletin to learn about new cases as they are added.
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Indian Law ReporterCall Number: Reference Area (KF8201.A3 !5)Publication Date: 1974-Available in HeinOnline.
Began covering tribal court cases in 1983, with stated intention of having cases on diverse issues from geographically diverse courts.
Some tribal courts—e.g., those of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Nation, the Ho-Chunk Nation, and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe—have many cases in almost every volume. Other tribal courts have only occasional cases in scattered volumes.
Note: publication in print has ceased (at least for now). Latest published in July/August 2013.
The set has no index of its own, but the National Indian Law Library posts a topical index to tribal court decisions in the Indian Law Reporter. You can browse by topic or search for keywords. And you can search the full text in HeinOnline.
A second set of the Indian Law Reporter is in the Classified Stacks (1974-92) and the Clinical Law Program (1993-). -
West's American Tribal Law ReporterCall Number: Reference Area (KF8204.5.W47)Publication Date: 2009-Covers selected tribal courts, 1997-, as well as federal courts of appeals and U.S. Supreme Court.
Access points:- tables of cases at front of each volume
- West topics and key numbers at the back of each volume
Coverage varies. Some tribes have cases in each volume; others have fewer cases.
Westlaw's AMTRIB-CS, which includes cases from this set, is not available on our academic subscription, BUT you can search it to get citations of cases to look up in the print set. Westlaw includes some cases that are not published in the print set.
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Northwest Intertribal Court System DecisionsCode Publishing.
The Northwest Intertribal Court System is a consortium of 15 tribes, each with its own court and code. The tribes are: Chehalis, Hoh, Lummi, Muckleshoot, Nisqually, Nooksack,Port Gamble, Sauk-Suiattle, Shoalwater Bay, S'Klallam, Skokomish, Squaxin Island, Suquamish, Swinomish, Tulalip, and Upper Skagit. (The Puyuallup Tribe was in the consortium but withdrew in 1991.)
Covers from late-1980s, with three cases 1987 and earlier.
Available in print: Tribal Court Appellate Decisions: Northwest Intertribal Court System (v. 1-5) and Tribal Appellate Court Opinions: Northwest Regional Appellate Courts (v. 6- ), Reference Area (KF8220.A515).
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Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals ReporterCall Number: Reference Area (KF8220.A515 S68)v. 1 (1990) to v. 22 (2011)
Commercial Online Sources
Casemaker includes cases from 63 courts (sometimes more than one court for one tribe).
- UW Law students and faculty can register free. Access is courtesy of the Washington State Bar Association.
- All Washington lawyers (and their staff) have access to Casemaker as a benefit of WSBA membership.
Lexis Advance includes (selected) decisions for over 45 courts (sometimes two courts for one tribe).
- UW Law students and faculty have individual passwords to Lexis Advance.
- People who visit the library and anyone at the UW may use Nexis Uni, the Lexis product that the University Libraries subscribes to. Nexis Uni includes tribal materials.
VersusLaw includes cases from over 22 tribal courts (21 tribes).
- UW law students and faculty can register free. Scroll to the bottom of the screen, under the banner Special Groups. Click the link for "More Information" about the student program.
Westlaw includes tribal court decisions from 22 tribes, plus its Oklahoma Tribal Court Reports collection, which includes "opinions issued by one of the CFR or tribal courts in Oklahoma, including the tribal courts, Courts of Indian Appeals, and Courts of Indian Offenses."
- Westlaw's tribal law materials are not included in UW Law's academic subscription, but users can still search them and learn that an opinion exists, often with a citation to West's American Tribal Law Reporter.
- Most but not all of the opinions on Westlaw are published in West's American Tribal Law Reporter.
- Coverage of tribes varies. For example searches in October 2017 yielded 415 cases from the Fort Peck Tribes but only 9 from the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation (and the most recent was from 2006).
Coverage is spotty for each source. A source that has cases from, say, 1990 might not have them from 2015.
Search interfaces vary. For example, as of December 2018, Casemaker did not allow sorting by date, and VersusLaw did not allow display of more than 200 cases from a single search.
Compare Coverage
Some tribes' opinions are in multiple sources, some in only one (and some not available at all). How can you compare the coverage of the different sources? The following chart lists tribes and the sources that publish at least some of each tribe's cases.
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Sources of Tribal Court DecisionsChart comparing coverage of tribal court decisions in print, in commercial online services, and on tribes' websites.
If you are interested in materials for one tribe in particular, the best access is through the National Indian Law Library's Tribal Law Gateway:
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Tribal Law Gateway
National Indian Law Library's list of tribes, with links to codes, constitutions, and decisions.