"You could hear the snap, crackle and pop of intellectual athletics as a different kind of Indian all-stars team, The First Thirteen, assembled at the University of New Mexico Law School in Albuquerque recently. These were the first Native American attorneys to argue Federal Indian law cases before the Supreme Court, from 1980 through 2001.

The event was sponsored by the American Indian Law Center (AILC) and others, the attorneys donated their own time and travel, and proceeds benefited the Pre-Law Summer Institute for American Indians and Alaska Natives (PLSI), a two month program of the Law Center that replicates the first semester of law school. In fact seven of these attorneys had attended that summer program before going on to law schools around the country.

To John P. LaVelle (Santee Sioux Nation), Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law, “the symposium provided a unique opportunity to hear groundbreaking Native attorneys share insights and reminisce about their common experience of having argued Indian law cases before the U.S. Supreme Court."

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Diane Schmidt: First Indian Law pioneers to Supreme Court and Deloria offers a fresh approach (Albuquerque Judaism Examine 4/6)