The government then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The chain of legal effort — from 1920 to 1942 to 1946 to 1974 to 1979 to 1980 — was not incidental.

It represents sixty years of sustained legal work by tribal governments, their attorneys, and their advocates, through institutions that were consistently hostile or at least skeptical, using legal tools that had to be fashioned specifically for the purpose.

The survival of the claim through all of that is itself part of what makes the 1980 decision significant: it was the culmination of an effort that the legal system had repeatedly tried to foreclose.

The Good Faith Test — What The Supreme Court Actually Found

The legal question at the heart of United States v.