California V. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians - Arguments and Ruling

Arguments and Ruling

The State of California contended that the Bands’ high-stakes bingo and poker games violated state law and requested that the Court recognize its statute governing the operation of bingo games. Riverside County additionally sought legal recognition of its ordinances regulating bingo play and prohibiting the operation of poker and other card games. California argued that under Public Law 280 (1953) Congress had granted six states – Alaska, California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin – criminal jurisdiction over Native American tribal lands within the state’s borders. If California’s regulatory laws prohibited gambling on a criminal basis, then it is likely Public Law 280 would have given the State of California the authority to enforce them on tribal lands. However, if as the Cabazon Band argued, California’s laws on gambling were civil regulatory laws, then the tribal lands would not in fact fall under the lawful jurisdiction of the state.

The Supreme Court held, as the Cabazon band argued, that because California State law did not prohibit gambling as a criminal act – and in fact encouraged it via the state lottery – they must be deemed regulatory in nature. As such, the authority to regulate gaming activities on tribal lands was found to fall outside those powers granted by the Public Law 280.

The Cabazon decision of 1987 had lasting implications regarding the sovereignty of Native American tribes in the United States. The ruling established a broader definition of tribal sovereignty and set that precedent that if the few states that with some lawful jurisdiction over tribal lands could not impose state regulations on reservation gaming, and then no state could have such a right. Indian gaming could thus only be called into question in states where gambling was deemed criminal by state law.