Atkinson Trading Company, Inc. v. Joe Shirley, JR., et al. (532 U.S. 645)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided May 29, 2001 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 532 U.S. 645 · 121 S. Ct. 1825
- Decided
- May 29, 2001
- Term
- October Term 2000
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Rehnquist
- Issue area
- Civil Rights
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
CHIEF Justice Rehnquist delivered the opinion of the Court. In Montana v. United States, 450 U.S. 544 (1981), we held that, with limited exceptions, Indian tribes lack eivü authority over the conduct of nonmembers on non-Indian fee land within a reservation. The question with which we are presented is whether this general rule applies to tribal attempts to tax nonmember activity occurring on non-Indian fee land. We hold that it does and that neither of Montana’s exceptions obtains here. In 1916, Hubert Richardson, lured by the possibility of trading with wealthy Gray Mountain Navajo cattlemen, built the Cameron Trading Post just south of the Little Colorado River near Cameron, Arizona. G. Richardson, Navajo Trader 136-137 (1986). Richardson purchased the land directly from the United States, but the Navajo Nation Reservation, which had been established in 1868, see 15 Stat. 667, was later extended eight miles south so that the Cameron Trading Post fell within its exterior boundaries. See Act of June 14, 1934, ch. 521, 48 Stat. 960-962. This 1934 enlargement of the Navajo Reservation — which today stretches across northeast Arizona, northwest New Mexico, and southeast Utah — did not alter the status of the property: It is, like millions of acres throughout the United States, non-Indian fee land within a tribal reservation. Richardson’s “drafty, wooden store building and four…
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