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Indians — night hunting

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//October 10, 2014//

Indians — night hunting

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//October 10, 2014//

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U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit

Civil

Indians — night hunting

The state cannot prohibit Indians from hunting deer at night.

“A motion to modify a judgment under Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b)(5) must, like any motion, be made in a reasonable time, since the rules specify no deadline. But what is reasonable depends on the circumstances. If reasonable reliance on a judgment is likely to grow over time, a motion to modify it should be made sooner rather than later. But in the case of regulatory decrees, such as the judgment in this case forbidding night hunting of deer, often the passage of time renders them obsolete, so that the case for modification or rescission actually grows with time, as in Horne v. Flores, 557 U.S. 433, 447–48 (2009), People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 246 F.3d 1073, 1075–76 (7th Cir. 2001), and Alliance to End Repression v. City of Chicago, 237 F.3d 799, 801 (7th Cir. 2001). That’s what seems to have happened in this case. Based on almost no experience with night deer hunting in the 1980s, the district court at the beginning of the next decade upheld on safety grounds Wisconsin’s ban on off-reservation night deer hunting by Indians. Greater experience with deer hunting suggests that a total ban is no longer (if it ever was) necessary to ensure public safety. And as noted in Reich v. Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, supra, 4 F.3d at 501, it is only safety (and conservation, which however is not an issue in this case) that can justify a state’s forbidding a normal Indian activity, authorized to the tribes on land ceded by them to the United States.”

Reversed and Remanded.

14-1051 Lad Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa v. State of Wisconsin

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Crabb, J., Posner, J.

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