Tribal Code Is Critical to Preserving Sovereignty and Developing the Reservation Economy

The paramount concern of perhaps every tribal government is tribal sovereignty. Likewise, a paramount concern of perhaps every business person is certainty. By codifying and publishing tribal law and making it available to the public, a tribal council can help address both of these concerns.

A tribal code should include all of the ordinances, resolutions, other sources of written law, and any standardized, but unwritten procedures followed by tribal government or the tribal court. Laws on the same subject, for example, civil procedure, should be organized into titles. The numbering system should be expandable so that new ordinances can be easily added.

All the non-law parts of the ordinance or resolution should be deleted and the remaining provisions should be copy-edited. The legislative history of each section in the code should be summarized in a consistent and systematic manner at the end of each section. The resulting code should be published on the tribal website.

Once the existing law is codified, the codification process per se is over. However, to reap the full benefits of codification, more should be done. The codifier should identify any gaping holes in the code that have prevented the assertion of tribal jurisdiction and the development of the tribal code, for example, a long-arm statute, and then draft new ordinances filling these gaps.

Next, the codifier should draft new legislation addressing current economic and political concerns, for example a tribal commercial code modeled on the uniform commercial code. Obviously, any new legislation must be presented to the tribal council and enacted before it can become part of the code.