The Supreme Court of the Navajo Nation is the highest judicial Native American authority of the Navajo Nation, the largest American Indian nation in the United States. According to Harvard Law School, "the judicial system of the Navajo Nation is the most active tribal judicial system in the United States, with a case load that rivals, and in some instances exceeds, many municipal, county, and state judicial systems."[1]
The Supreme Court of the Navajo Nation sits in Window Rock.[2] It is a three-member body consisting of the Chief Justice JoAnn Jayne, and Associate Justices Eleanor Shirley and Tina Tsinigine.[3]
History
The Supreme Court of the Navajo Nation was originally created as the Navajo Tribal Court of Appeals on 1 April 1959 as part of the implementation of the Navajo Tribal Council's establishment of the judiciary as a separate branch of government, the "Judicial Branch of the Navajo Nation Government".[4] Originally it was the court of last resort on the Navajo Nation. From 1978[5] to 1985[6] the "Supreme Judicial Council", a political body rather than a court, could hear appeals, on a discretionary basis, from the Navajo Tribal Court of Appeals.
In December 1985 the Supreme Judicial Council was eliminated and the Navajo Tribal Court of Appeals became the Supreme Court of the Navajo Nation.[6] It was expressly made the court of last resort.[7]
^"Navajo Supreme Court"Archived 2006-09-05 at the Wayback Machine on the occasion of the Supreme Court of the Navajo Nation Oral Arguments Perry v. Navajo Nation Labor Commission April 12, 2006, Harvard Law School
^Austin, Raymond Darrel (2009) "The Navajo Nation court system" pp. 1–36, page 31In Austin, Raymond Darrel (2009) Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law: A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, ISBN978-0-8166-6535-8
"Navajo Nation", Caselaw Access Project, Harvard Law School, OCLC1078785565, Court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law Library