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Few Indian reservations have any semblance of a private sector. Consequently, poverty and unemployment are major problems in much of Indian country. While there are many reasons why private enterprise is scarce in Indian country, one of the foremost reasons is businesses do not trust tribal courts. Businesses' distrust of tribal courts is not unique as outsiders often fear bias in foreign tribunals. Similarly, businesses are often concerned about a court's capacity to adjudicate complex disputes. Federal diversity jurisdiction was developed to allay fear of bias, and many states have developed business courts to address questions about court capacity. Tribes can overcome these issues by creating an intertribal business court (IBC). Tribes will be free to sculpt the IBC as they see fit. However, the IBC's intertribal nature will help reduce fears of bias, and an IBC's focus on business disputes will answer doubts about court capacity. An IBC will also make tribal law more accessible, further increasing confidence in this new tribunal. As businesses gain greater confidence in tribal legal institutions through the IBC, they will be more likely to operate in Indian country. Accordingly, the IBC could help to transform tribal economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including customary law, discretionary transfer of cases from state to tribal courts, preoccupation in customary law literature.

This article examines how a Wisconsin statute passed in 2009 that authorized state court judges to transfer cases to American Indian tribal courts unfolded as a political and legal process that was both informed by and produced by fundamental conceptions of cultural difference. It calls specific attention to jurisprudential differences in the form of jury trials and peacemaking in figuring the differences between conceptions of tribal membership and state citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution of the joint tribal-state court system in Northern Minnesota. The first tribal-state jurisdiction was created in 2006 through the Joint Powers Agreement between the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Tribal Court and the Cass County District Court. The article discusses the implications of this relatively new form of justice for adult and juvenile justice systems.

This article analyzes the temporalities that emerge in interactions before the tribal court of the Hopi Indian Nation. Particular attention will be paid to the interdiscursive strategies employed by courtroom interlocutors negotiating between adherence to Anglo-legal notions of fact and norm, and the narratives of Hopi tradition regularly raised by litigants in property dispute hearings. It will be argued that such negotiations are at once central to the “sovereign time” that contemporary Hopi law instantiates for the Hopi Nation, but also stand in a complex relationship to the temporalities generated by the “storied moments” of Hopi litigants' tradition discourses. The effect is that these traditions get legally framed as sometimes near to, sometimes far from, the lives and times of Hopi people today. In conclusion, it will be suggested that similar tensions of norm and fact resound in certain critical assessments of anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly those that focus on the implicit orientations to time and temporality that rest at the heart of ethnography's representational practices and the authority they generate. [time; tradition; law; interdiscursivity; Hopi] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]