The State AGs Brief:
The AGs’ brief may also be the most important amicus brief, in that 18 state attorneys general signed on to a brief drafted and distributed by the Arizona AG. No state AG filed an amicus brief supporting petitioners. While the contents of the brief are important (they attack the existing Indian family exception (EIF) and provide a defense against the federalism attack on ICWA), the mere fact of the brief is very powerful. The Minnesota DHS brief is along the same lines.

The Strategic Briefs:
These three briefs form the cornerstone of the amicus strategy. As usual, the NCAI brief offers greater national context for the dispute in issue, offering legislative history and even some sociological history. The law profs brief, IMHO the best law profs brief ever filed in the Indian cases before the Supreme Court, is the legal history of ICWA, written by one of the very best legal historians out there, Stuart Banner, former SOC clerk. The constitutionality brief defends against the farthest-reaching attacks of some of the petitioners, that ICWA is unconstitutional. It focuses on the doctrine we call the political status doctrine, first articulated by the Supreme Court in Morton v. Mancari.