Supreme Court Throws Out Indian Reservation Land Law

The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a federal law that requires small shares of Indian reservation land owned by individual tribe members to revert to the tribe when the owners die.

Ruling 8-1 in a case involving reservation land in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, the court said the law amounts to an unconstitutional taking of private property without fair payment.

The law “severely restricts the right of an individual to direct the descent of his property,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote.

Between 1887 and 1934, much of the land on Indian reservations was divided into tracts and allotted to tribe members. But as the land passed from one generation to another, large numbers of people began inheriting smaller and smaller shares of tracts.

In 1983, Congress enacted the Indian Land Consolidation Act, which required many of the tiniest fractions of ownership to revert to the tribe when the owner died. The Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that the law violated the Constitution’s ban on government takings of private property without fair compensation.

Congress subsequently amended the law. The new version affected land interests representing 2 percent or less of a tract that would not generate income, from farming or other use, more than $100 during any of the next five years. Owners could leave such land interests to someone who already owned a share of the tract. The new law also said tribes could override the law by enacting their own policies with Interior Department approval.

William Youpee, a member of the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, died in October 1990. He owned small interests in land on the Fort Peck Reservation, the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota and the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border.

Youpee’s heirs sued after an Interior Department official ruled that the land must revert to the tribes. A federal judge ruled the law unconstitutional, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld those rulings. The new amendments did not solve the law’s constitutional problems, Ginsburg wrote.

The law is based on income generated by the land rather than the actual value of the land, she wrote.

Noting that Youpee’s land was valued at $1,239, Ginsburg said, “the economic impact of (the amended law) might still be palpable.”

The lone dissenter, Justice John Paul Stevens, said: “The federal interest in minimizing the fractionated ownership of Indian lands - and thereby paving the way to the productive development of their property - is strong enough to justify the legislative remedy.”

The case is Babbitt vs. Youpee, 95-1595.