Robert A. Williams Jr.

Last updated

Robert A. Williams Jr. is an American lawyer, author, and legal scholar. He works in the fields of federal Indian law, international law, indigenous peoples' rights, critical race and post-colonial theory. [1] Williams teaches at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law, serving as Regents Professor, E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and Faculty Chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program. [2]

Contents

Family

Williams is the son of Robert Anthony Williams Sr. and Sallie Williams. He has a wife and two children, Sam and Marley. He has a sister named Karen Amanda Cooper (née Williams) who has four children: Zac, Andrew, K.C., and Ben Cooper.

Early life and education

Williams is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe of North Carolina. He earned his B.A. from Loyola College in Maryland in 1977 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1980.

Career

Now at University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, Williams has established a notable career in the fields of American Indian and International law, indigenous people's rights, and critical race and colonial theory. He has published several books on these topics.

For the 2003-2004 academic year, Williams was named the first Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He previously taught there as the Bennet Boskey Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of Law. [3]

Williams served as Chief Justice for the Court of Appeals, Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation. He also served as Justice for the Court of Appeals and trial judge pro tem for the Tohono O'odham Nation.

Williams has represented tribal groups before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples. He served as co-counsel for Floyd Hicks in the United States Supreme Court case, Nevada v. Hicks 533 U.S. 353 (2001).

Awards and honors

Williams has received awards from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Soros Foundation Open Society Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Institute of Justice in recognition of his research and advocacy on behalf of Indian tribes and indigenous peoples. [2]

Selected works

Related Research Articles

Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978), is a United States Supreme Court case deciding that Indian tribal courts have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians. The case was decided on March 6, 1978 with a 6–2 majority. The court opinion was written by William Rehnquist, and a dissenting opinion was written by Thurgood Marshall, who was joined by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Justice William J. Brennan did not participate in the decision.

Indian reservation Land managed by Native American nations under the US Bureau of Indian Affairs

An Indian reservation is an area of land tenure governed by a federally recognized Native American tribal nation under the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, rather than by the government of the state in which it is located. The 326 Indian reservations in the United States are associated with specific Native American nations, often on a one-to-one basis. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one reservation, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. In addition, because of past land allotments, leading to sales to non–Native Americans, some reservations are severely fragmented, with each piece of tribal, individual, and privately held land being a separate enclave. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political and legal difficulties.

Vine Deloria Jr. American writer

Vine Victor Deloria Jr. was an author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights. He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which helped attract national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement. From 1964 to 1967, he served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, increasing tribal membership from 19 to 156. Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and in Washington, DC, on the Mall.

Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of US civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to critically examine the intersection of race and US law and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. CRT examines social, cultural, and legal issues primarily as they relate to race and racism in the US. A tenet of CRT is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals.

Native American studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the history, culture, politics, issues, spiritual, sociology and contemporary experience of Native peoples in North America, or, taking a hemispheric approach, the Americas. Increasingly, debate has focused on the differences rather than the similarities between other Ethnic studies disciplines such as African American studies, Asian American Studies, and Latino/a Studies.

Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that held that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans. As the facts were recited by Chief Justice John Marshall, the successor in interest to a private purchase from the Piankeshaw attempted to maintain an action of ejectment against the holder of a federal land patent.

Indigenous land rights are the rights of Indigenous peoples to land and natural resources therein, either individually or collectively, mostly in colonised countries. Land and resource-related rights are of fundamental importance to Indigenous peoples for a range of reasons, including: the religious significance of the land, self-determination, identity, and economic factors. Land is a major economic asset, and in some Indigenous societies, using natural resources of land and sea form the basis of their household economy, so the demand for ownership derives from the need to ensure their access to these resources. Land can also be an important instrument of inheritance or a symbol of social status. In many Indigenous societies, such as among the many Aboriginal Australian peoples, the land is an essential part of their spirituality and belief systems.

Oren R. Lyons Jr. is a Native American Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan. The Seneca are one of the Six Nations of the historic Haudenosaunee Confederacy. For more than 14 years he has been a member of the Indigenous Peoples of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, and has had other leadership roles.

Discovery doctrine Concept of public international law

The discovery doctrine, also called doctrine of discovery, is a concept of public international law expounded by the United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions, most notably Johnson v. M'Intosh in 1823. Chief Justice John Marshall explained and applied the way that colonial powers laid claim to lands belonging to foreign sovereign nations during the Age of Discovery. Under it, European Christian governments could lay title to non-European Christian territory on the basis that the colonisers travelled and "discovered" said territory. The doctrine has been primarily used to support decisions invalidating or ignoring aboriginal possession of land in favor of modern governments, such as in the 2005 case of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation.

United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886), was a United States Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of the Major Crimes Act of 1885. This Congressional act gave the federal courts jurisdiction in certain cases of Indian-on-Indian crimes, even if the crimes were committed on an Indian reservation. Kagama, a Yurok Native American (Indian) accused of murder, was selected as a test case by the Department of Justice to test the constitutionality of the Act.

In Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States the term treaty rights specifically refers to rights for indigenous peoples enumerated in treaties with settler societies that arose from European colonization.

ArizonaNativeNet is the first online virtual university designed for use by Native American communities in the United States and Native Nations around the world.

The James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona has created an academic center for the study of American Indian and indigenous peoples law, policy, and human rights. The Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy (IPLP) Program furthers the research, training, and advocacy of Indian law and international law of indigenous peoples.

James Anaya

Stephen James Anaya is an American lawyer and the 16th Dean of the University of Colorado Boulder Law School. He was formerly the James J. Lenoir Professor of Human Rights Law and Policy at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law and previously served for more than ten years on the faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law. In March 2008, he was appointed by the United Nations as its Special Rapporteur on the situation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, replacing Rodolfo Stavenhagen. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

Implicit divestiture is the ability of the Supreme Court of the United States to solely determine the extent of an Indian Nation's sovereignty, an approach, of recent decades, to federal Indian policy, which is contradictory to U.S. Constitutional protections of Native American sovereignty.

Bryan v. Itasca County, 426 U.S. 373 (1976), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a state did not have the right to assess a tax on the property of a Native American (Indian) living on tribal land absent a specific Congressional grant of authority to do so.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to United States federal Indian law and policy:

<i>In the Courts of the Conqueror</i>

In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided is a 2010 legal non-fiction book by Walter R. Echo-Hawk, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the Pawnee Nation, an adjunct professor of law at the University of Tulsa College of Law, and of counsel with Crowe & Dunlevy.

David E. Wilkins, a citizen of the Lumbee Nation, is a political scientist specializing in federal Indian policy and law. He is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor in Leadership Studies at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies in the University of Richmond. He studies Native politics, governance, and legal systems, with a particular focus on Native sovereignty, self-determination, and diplomacy. Wilkins was a student of Vine Deloria Jr., coauthoring two books with Deloria and writing a book about his intellectual impact.

Clifford M. Lytle was a political scientist, scholar of Native American studies, and legal scholar. He was a Distinguished University Professor in the department of political science at the University of Arizona. He frequently collaborated with fellow University of Arizona political science professor Vine Deloria Jr.

References

  1. "Robert A. Williams, Jr.", UN Jobs, accessed 16 Aug 2009
  2. 1 2 Tribal Leaders Program, "Robert A. William, Jr., University of Washington School of Law, accessed 17 Aug 2009
  3. "Robert A. Williams, Jr.", Harvard Law, accessed 15 Aug 2009