Carpenter v. Murphy isn’t one of the more high-profile Supreme Court cases in recent years, but it may lead to one of the most consequential decisions this term. The dispute, for which the court heard oral arguments on Tuesday, is relatively straightforward: Does the Muscogee Creek Nation’s reservation in Oklahoma still legally exist? If the answer is yes, then the result is far but simple: Half of the state could fall under tribal jurisdiction—with significant ramifications for taxes, regulations, and criminal investigations.



In a legal twist for the ages, this all proceeds from a murder case. Patrick Murphy, a member of the Creek Nation, was convicted and sentenced to death for murder in McIntosh County, Oklahoma. But his lawyers have argued that because the murder took place within the Creek reservation’s borders, only the federal government, rather than the state government, has the power to sentence him.

Now the court faces a quintessential legal dilemma: Should it do what is easy, or what is correct? Some of the justices on Tuesday appeared to favor the easy road—overturning the lower court decision in favor of the Creek Nation’s historic sovereignty claim, and leaving the status quo intact. “There’s a fundamental principle of law that derives from Sherlock Holmes, which is the dog that didn’t bark,” quipped Justice Samuel Alito at one point. “And how can it be that none of this was recognized by anybody or asserted by the Creek Nation, as far as I’m aware, for 100 years?” (To the contrary, the Creek Nation asserted political jurisdiction over their historical territory in their 1979 constitution.)

A ruling in the state’s favor would still require some judicial legerdemain on the justices’ part since the existing precedents strongly favor Murphy. Only Congress can legally extinguish a Native American reservation, and the Supreme Court has previously held that courts can’t simply infer that a reservation no longer exists from other congressional actions, even if it’s functionally defunct. Though Congress passed multiple laws to strip tribes in Oklahoma of their sovereignty, it passed nothing that explicitly abolished the Creek reservation.

What’s more, Congress passed a law in 1906 that explicitly declined to disestablish the reservations. This should give the Creek Nation the upper hand, at least in theory. “The problem is that Congress, when it did speak, basically said we’re not going to end tribal sovereignty,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “So the Congress, exactly around this same time period, basically says, we’re not going to disenfranchise the tribes. We’re going to keep them alive.”