Good Lawyers Get Good Results

It’s good to have legally recognized rights, but it’s even better to have good lawyers too.

I never doubted that the Bad River Chippewa had the right to decide what’s not in the water that flows through their reservation from upstream. But I have lately wondered whether they have lawyers with the skills and resources necessary to defend that right.

Now I see they will be represented by a specialized, expert team within Godfrey & Kahn. Attorney Pierson’s editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this week shows he and his people thoroughly understand the legal ground of the right. His argument based on land cession treaties is already convincing, and he didn’t even mention the EPA’s grant of additional rights over water quality to Native American tribes so situated.

The upshot is, the mine will never be built without the consent of the Bad River band.

Here’s a notion: give the Penokee Hills back to the Chippewa – if not to the Bad River band, to the whole Ojibwe nation. The nation has reservations; for purposes of treaties they are a nation pretty much like the United States is. So they’ll be there forever. And so will the iron…

…that is, until the Ojibwe decide when and how to remove it. Same amount of ore, same amount of jobs, same amount of wealth creation, moreover the same duration of the mining operations and hence the jobs, and no legal obstacles – assuming only and reasonably that the Ojibwe would impose even stricter environmental safeguards than those Gogebic Taconite and billionaire Cline, through their friends in the legislature, chose to accept.

What were they thinking? Did they think they could steamroller the band once they got the enabling legislation? They wrote the bill to impose the greatest expense for environmental safeguards they would profitably accept, at the least actual level of environmental protection their friends in the legislature could politically accept. A nice balance! – all in active disregard of the band’s interests and rights.

An organization as grasping and arrogant as this is not the right organization to operate the mine. Anyway, they’ll have their hands full with Godfrey & Kahn.