"In light of recent commentaries about the value (or lack thereof) of legal scholarship and new scholarship about the frequency the Supreme Court Justices cite to legal scholarship (it’s rather a lot), we thought it would be fun to list some findings about the Supreme Court’s citations of Indian law scholarship going back to 1959.

We’ll look later at the frequency of citations overall in later work.

Treatises and Casebooks

First, let’s get the Cohen Handbook out of the way. We have a liberal definition of legal scholarship (no pun intended). The numbers in parentheses are number of cases, and number of citations):

Cohen 2005 — 2 cases, 11 citations [U.S. v Jicarilla Apache had 10 cites alone -- guess the Court is finally reading the thing]

Cohen 1982 — 31, 72

Cohen 1958 [actually, Dept. of Interior rewrite] — 20, 40

Cohen 1940/1940/1942/1945 — 15, 29

Overall, the Handbook of Federal Indian Law in all its incarnations has been cited in 68 cases, for a total of 152 citations."

Get the Story:
Supreme Court Citations to Indian Law Scholarship (Turtle Talk 8/15)

Related Stories:
Turtle Talk: Top 25 most cited Supreme Court Indian law rulings (8/9)
Turtle Talk: The top 25 most cited Indian and tribal law articles (8/8)