Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/21-429_8o6a.pdf
Page Number: 58.0

30 

OKLAHOMA v. CASTRO-HUERTA 

GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

them.  The Court may choose to disregard our precedents, 
but it does not purport to overrule a single one.  As a result, 
today’s decision surely marks an embarrassing new entry 
into  the  anticanon  of  Indian  law.    But  its  mistakes  need 
not—and should not—be repeated. 

III 

Doubtless  for  some  of  these  reasons,  even  the  Court 
ultimately  abandons  its  suggestion  that  Oklahoma  is
“inherent[ly]”  free  to  prosecute  crimes  by  non-Indians 
against  tribal  members  on  a  tribal  reservation  absent  a
federal statute “preempt[ing]” its authority.  Ante, at 15.  In 
the  end,  the  Court  admits  that  tribal  sovereignty  can 
require  the  exclusion  of  state  authority  even  absent  a 
preemptive  federal  statute.  Ante,  at  18.  But  then,  after 
correcting  course,  the  Court  veers  off  once  more.  To 
determine  whether  tribal  sovereignty  displaces  state
authority  in  a  case  involving  a  non-Indian  defendant  and 
an Indian victim on a reservation in Oklahoma, the Court 
resorts to a “Bracker balancing” test.  Ibid.  Applying that
test, the Court concludes that Oklahoma’s interests in this 
case  outweigh  those  of  the  Cherokee.    All  this,  too,  is 
mistaken root and branch. 

A 

Begin  with  the  most  fundamental  problem.  The  Court 
invokes what it calls the “Bracker balancing” test with no
more  appreciation  of  that  decision’s  history  and  context 
than it displays in its initial suggestion that the usual rules
of preemption apply to Tribes.  The Court tells us nothing 
about  Bracker  itself,  its  reasoning,  or  its  limits.    Perhaps
understandably so, for Bracker never purported to claim for
this  Court  the  raw  power  to  “balance”  away  tribal
sovereignty  in  favor  of  state  criminal  jurisdiction  over 
crimes  by  or  against  tribal  members—let  alone  ordain  a 
wholly  different  set  of  jurisdictional  rules  than  Congress