Uniform Laws: Possible Useful Tribal Legislation
![handle is hein.journals/tlj36 and id is 319 raw text is: UNIFORM LAWS: POSSIBLE USEFUL TRIBAL
LEGISLATION
Fred H. Miller* and Duchess Bartmess**
THE NEED FOR AND CREATION OF NCCUSL
One hundred and nine years ago, what became the National Conference of
Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL or Conference) held its first
meeting in Saratoga Springs, New York.' [R]epresentatives from seven states -
Delaware, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, New Jersey and
Pennsylvania met... [for three days] in the parlor of the Massachusetts
Commissioners in the Grand Union Hotel.''2 Today, NCCUSL has
representatives from every state, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands,
and Puerto Rico. It is responsible for hundreds of statutes enacted by the
jurisdictions that comprise it, including the Uniform Commercial Code and other
equally important statutes in the areas of business law, family law, trust and
estates law, civil procedure, and other legal subjects.
[NCCUSL] is an organization peculiar to the federal system of
government.., and is unique in American law.3 'American law' [of course]
actually consists of fifty separate, and potentially differing, bodies of state law, co-
existing with, and overlaid by, federal law.4 The concluding article of the Bill of
Rights, the Tenth Amendment, epitomizes the federal system that the
Constitution created.,5 It reserves to the states 'the powers not delegated to the
United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states ....
Because of this limitation, nearly all private law - contracts, negotiable
instruments, business organizations, marriage and divorce, for example - and most
* Kenneth McAfee Centennial Professor, George Lynn Cross Research Professor, University of
Oklahoma College of Law. Professor Miller also is Executive Director of the National Conference of
Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL).
**Former counsel to Governor Frank Keating and now in private practice in Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma.
1. WALTER P. ARMSTRONG, JR., A CENTURY OF SERvIcE: A CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF THE
NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF COMMISSIONERS ON UNIFORM STATE LAWS, 11 (1991).
2. Id.
3. Id. at 3.
4. Id.
5. Id.
6. Id.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/tlj36&div=22&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Uniform Laws: Possible Useful Tribal Legislation
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