Kristin Tix v. Robert Tix
Split Score
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Case Summary
Disposition
Reversed
The Eighth Circuit held that the Prairie Island Tribal Court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to adjudicate a divorce between a tribal member and a non-member spouse who lived off-reservation. Rejecting the district court’s reliance on Montana’s consensual-relationship exception, the panel reversed the grant of summary judgment to the husband and remanded with instructions to declare the tribal divorce order void and enjoin its enforcement.
Circuit Split Identified
Legal Issue
Whether Plains Commerce Bank v. Long Family Land & Cattle Co. narrowed Montana’s ‘consensual-relationship’ exception so that tribal jurisdiction over non-members is limited to situations necessary to protect tribal self-government and internal relations.
Circuit Positions
Plains Commerce narrowed the consensual-relationship exception; tribal jurisdiction over non-members is valid only when necessary to protect tribal self-government or internal relations.
Plains Commerce did not narrow the exception; a consensual relationship itself can justify tribal jurisdiction over non-members.
Conflict Summary
The Eighth, Sixth, and Seventh Circuits read Plains Commerce as imposing a substantive limit on the consensual-relationship exception—tribes may regulate or adjudicate only when the regulation is necessary to protect tribal self-government or internal relations—whereas the Ninth Circuit holds that Plains Commerce added no such limitation and that a consensual relationship alone can suffice.