Article IV and Indian Tribes

Abstract

Unlike the first three articles of the Constitution which create the three branches of the federal government, Article IV establishes a set of rules to police the actions of states and knit them together into a single union. Notably absent from Article IV is any mention of the tribal sovereign. Concomitantly, there has been no comprehensive academic discussion thinking about how the tribal sovereign complicates the purposes of Article IV. This piece advances a completely new understanding of Article IV and its implications in federal Indian law. It suggests that where Article IV advances rights to individual citizens (i.e. a citizen’s right to enforce a court judgment or their claim to the protection of the Privileges and Immunities Clause) then states may not use their connection to any tribal sovereign as an excise to deny them the protections of those rights. In contrast, where Articles IV speaks to rules designed to ensure states treat each other respectfully (i.e. requests for extradition, claims under the Equal Footing Doctrine, or any attempt to enforce the Guarantee Clause) then Article IV’s rules do not permit states to abridge, abrogate, modify, or erode the inherent rights of tribal nations. As the Court has recently opined, tribal governments themselves were absent from the Constitutional Convention and so constitutional limitations on the inherent powers of sovereigns do not extend to tribal governments.

Keywords: Indian, Indigenous, Native American, Article IV, Full Faith and Credit, Extradition, Privileges and Immunities, Republican Form of Government, tribal sovereignty, sovereignty, constitutional interpretation