Court Opinion

ID: 9455745
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:31:57.116291+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:43.027178
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Judge
(concurring):
I join in most of the opinion and in the judgment of the court but I would like to add some comment to the opinion respecting issue I, that is, “Adopting an arbitrary rule governing the allowance of gratuitous offsets.” The supposed arbitrary rule is that in case of the overreaching of an Indian Tribe by acquisition of its lands at an unconscionable consideration, the Commission will not allow “gratuities” for subsistence of the tribe except to the extent the “gratuities” for any year exceed 5% of the deficiency in consideration, as it is supposed the tribe, if adequately paid, could have financed its own subsistence to that extent at least. This rule, announced June 4, 1969, I fear has by this time been applied, as the Commission said it would be, in numerous cases.
The Commission is authorized to allow an offset for gratuitous expenditures only if it finds that “the entire course of dealings and accounts between the United States and the claimant in good conscience warrants such action”, 25 U.S.C. § 70a. As I read the Commission’s analysis of the problem, it cannot persuade its conscience that the instant offset is warranted, in light of facts it sets out in its opinion. If the matter were res integra, I would agree. This court points out that the conscience of the Commission, as previously constituted, and of this court, were not troubled by similar allowances in prior years. Undoubtedly, guilt and self-abasement over wrongs to Indians were rooted in the national psyche by 1946, as the cited Act itself demonstrates, but were then nothing to what they have become today. Thus a decision that satisfied the conscience in 1946 may fail to do so now. Undoubtedly, to the Commission, their decision appears as a perfectly straight-forward exercise of the powers delegated to them by Congress.
I believe that in answer this court should explain what it thinks “good conscience” means, instead of just what it does not mean. Suppose the Commission takes up the gratuities one by one (and, as I understand it, the items *1231listed in Finding 60 are not individual gratuities, but the totals for each year of maybe hundreds), and declares that the Government has failed to show they are justified in good conscience, the state of the Commission’s conscience being what it is. What have we said to show whether this is right or wrong? The expiration of the Commission’s charter is now just over the horizon and in remanding a ease we ought to specify enough so that we need not remand it again.
I start with the proposition that the words “good conscience” have strong overtones of the principles of equity. Equity courts were called courts “of conscience.” The Congress was thinking about equity: in this § 70a to be construed it mentions “equity” four times, always set off against “law” and finally allows “claims based upon fair and honorable dealings that are not recognized by any existing rule of law or equity" (emphasis supplied). Equity had a body of rules separate from law and in the Federal courts up to 1938 equity cases were adjudicated in an entirely distinct type of proceeding. Undoubtedly, the “chancellor” or his American counterpart had more freedom than a law judge had to apply his conscience as a guide to the decision of individual cases. But the very use of the word “rule” implies that the “chancellor” was never, within the fully developed system of separate equity jurisprudence, free to decide cases solely by the light of his own individual conscience or to do just as seemed right to him. He studied the decided cases and followed them just as the law judge would. From the time of Charles II's restoration, approximately, equity was simply a “recognized part of the law of the land.” Before that time “chancellors” may have adjudicated without much reference to case law, for cases were not adequately reported, but they had in mind the idea of a “law of nature,” and maxims of jurisprudence borrowed from the canonists or civilians, as well as, of course, the English common law.
As authority for the above paragraph, if wanted, see generally, Chafee and Re’s excellent Cases and Materials on Equity (5th Ed. 1967).
There are special reasons for a close following of precedents applicable to this particular Act. We are not concerned with a constitution designed to endure “for ages to come” and consequently requiring adjustment in meaning from time to time to meet contemporary requirements as judicially conceived. Here we have a special charter written to be fully executed on or before April 10, 1972 (25 U.S.C. § 70v, as amended April 10, 1967). The purpose of it we have recently considered in Gila River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, et al. v. United States, 427 F.2d 1194, 190 Ct.Cl. 790 (decided February 20, 1970). It was to gather together all claims of Indian tribes accrued before 1946, such as had previously been decided under special acts, not always consistent in language, and to obtain their final adjudication on uniform principles so that neither Congress nor the courts would be troubled with them anymore. A change in the principles of decision during the life of the charter would frustrate this purpose because tribes subjected to adverse decisions in the early part of the work, according to rules later abandoned, surely would have in such discrimination an irrefutable argument for new special legislation. Judge Davis, concurring in the above case, said (427 F.2d p. 1200):
* * * But it would be wrong for judges to read into the Indian Claims Commission Act, passed almost twenty-five years ago, currents of thought which are emerging today but were not infused into that 1946 statute. * * *
Besides the legislative history, the suits brought by attorneys who had been instrumental in obtaining passage of the legislation were a persuasive indication of what jurisdiction the Congress intended to create.
*1232Thus it appears to me that the Commission’s conscience, speaking as of 1969, is no warrant for putting forward new rules contrary to prior practice for the allowance or disallowance of offsets, and this is true even though a 5% exclusion was never specifically proposed and specifically rejected in cases prior to this. It will be necessary to consider the past cases, establish how offsets were dealt with in them, and deduce rules therefrom to govern disposition of the Commission’s remaining caseload. If the precedents are conflicting, this is no new problem for a court of equity, and to resolve them is better than to create new conflicts.
I would also add that the Commission is apparently to exercise its conscience respecting offsets according to “the nature of the claim and the entire course of dealings and accounts between the United States and the claimant.” I do not read this as necessarily requiring investigation of the equities respecting each separate Government sack of peanuts the tribe may have consumed. With all respect, it seems to me the language may visualize what might be called offsets against offsets, i. e., that wrongs not permissibly the subject of direct claims might be considered as “in good conscience” an insuperable objection to allowance of offsets. Item by item inquiries seem more appropriate when the issue is e. g., whether the expenditure was for the benefit of the tribe not when it relates to “good conscience.”
Therefore, it could be the findings might be restructured to justify the result the Commission wishes to reach without the detailed investigation Judge Skelton visualizes. But the Commission simply cannot seize on the wrong of defendant in frustrating the allowance of interest by having paid $10,000 instead of zero, as being of itself a “good eon-science” bar, because the precedents are against it.
LARAMORE, Judge, joins in the foregoing concurring opinion.