(Originally published by Slate on June 20, 2023)

If judges are going to use history as their guide, they should probably try to get the history right.

When, a decade ago, I was a graduate student toiling away on my dissertation, I could not have imagined that Justice Clarence Thomas would one day devote a lengthy footnote in a Supreme Court opinion to arguing why my obscure historical research was wrong. But that is what happened in the court’s recent decision in Haaland v. Brackeen. By a 7–2 vote, the court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA)—a critical federal law that provides procedural protections for Native children when their parents are unable to care for them—against a long-standing campaign begun by right-wing think tanks to overturn it.

(Continue reading the opinion essay on Slate’s page here)