When I picked up the phone, I didn’t know that Pommersheim, as an appellate justice of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians Supreme Court, actually wrote the tribal-court opinion that Dollar General is fighting. That opinion doesn’t say that Dollar General is liable for damages; it just says that the tribal court can hear a claim against the company for actions occurring in its store located on tribal land.

Pommersheim, as you can imagine, is nettled by Dollar General’s argument, especially because it plays into a tribal-courts-are-untrustworthy narrative the Court has adopted before. “The Supreme Court has fallen victim to negative stereotypes about tribal courts,” he told me. “It does not ‘trust’ them to be competent and fair. That is most unfortunate and quite inaccurate.”

Obviously Pommersheim’s got a dog in the fight. But note that any appellate bench in America—state, federal, or tribal—would be lucky to have a judge with his credentials. And that tells us at least something about tribal justice in America. For nearly a century, Congress and the executive have been encouraging tribes to build justice systems in the mold of the overall American system—recruiting professional judges, training professional staff, writing tribal codes, and producing a corps of trained lawyers. Indian tribes are trying hard to modernize, and many, including the Mississippi Choctaw, appear to be succeeding.

But in a series of cases beginning in the 1980s, the Supreme Court majority has cut back on tribal jurisdiction. Tribal courts may not try non-Indians for crimes committed on the reservation. (The Court originally decided that tribal courts could not even try Indians who were members of other tribes, but Congress stepped in to reverse that result.) They can no longer adjudicate civil disputes between two non-member parties—an auto accident, say, on a federal highway that crosses the reservation. And in a 1981 case called Montana v. United States, the Court announced that “the inherent sovereign powers of an Indian tribe do not extend to the activities of nonmembers of the tribe”—seemingly regardless of location. Montana allowed two exceptions: cases arising from “consensual relationships with the tribe or its members,” and cases where the non-members’ on-reservation “conduct threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity, the economic security, or the health or welfare of the tribe.”

This case, the tribe now argues, involves both Montana exceptions. Dollar General owns and operates a store on tribal trust land inside the Choctaw Reservation near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Under the terms of the lease, “[t]his agreement and any related documents shall be construed according to the laws of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and the state of Mississippi” and “[e]xclusive venue and jurisdiction shall be in the Tribal Court.” So there has been at least some consent to tribal jurisdiction.