Court Opinion

ID: 9426693
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:40.696865+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:02.436646
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, concurring in part and concurring in the result.
I join Parts I and II of the Court’s opinion, but otherwise I concur only in the result.
For me, the reversal of the District Court’s judgment is not a result that is so inevitable and so easily and smoothly reached as a reading of Part III of the Court’s opinion makes it appear. The Court’s justifications for exclusion of the Kansas Delawares are not very persuasive. The first—favoritism toward tribal Indians—is undermined by the fact that Absentee Delawares who are not members of that tribe nevertheless are entitled to participate. Ante, at 82 n. 14. The second—exclusion from a prior distribution—is troublesome because it is difficult for me to see how perceived prior unfair treatment buttresses further unfairness. And I wonder about the statement, ante, at 87, that Congress “has his*91torically distinguished" the Kansas Delawares from the Cherokee Delawares in distributing tribal awards, when in fact both participated in the 1968 allocation that Congress authorized for the Delawares. The third justification—administrative convenience in eliminating the catchall clause—may have some weight. But, as the opinion acknowledges, ante, at 88-89, there was no problem with the Kansas Delawares in the distribution of the 1968 award; the administrative difficulty was only with the Munsees.
Nevertheless, having said all this, I am not persuaded that the Court errs in its conclusion. For me, the case is one of that rare type in which the argument on each side is not at all strong. With the litigation in this lukewarm posture, I conclude that we must acknowledge that there necessarily is a large measure of arbitrariness in distributing an award for a century-old wrong. One could regard the distribution as a windfall for whichever beneficiaries are now favored. In light of the difficulty in determining appropriate standards for the selection of those who are to receive the benefits, I cannot say that the distribution directed by the Congress is unreasonable and constitutionally impermissible. Congress must have a large measure of flexibility in allocating Indian awards, and what it has done here is not beyond the constitutional pale.