Cherokee Cases : Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty

This compact history is the first to explore two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases of the early 1830s: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia. Legal historian Jill Norgren details the extraordinary story behind these cases, describing how John Ross and other leaders of the Cherokee Nation, having internalized the principles of American law, tested their sovereignty rights before Chief Justice John Marshall in the highest court of the land. The Cherokees’ goal was to solidify these rights and to challenge the aggressive actions that the government and people of Georgia carried out against them under the aegis of law. Written in a style accessible both to students and to general readers, The Cherokee Cases is an ideal guide to understanding the political development of the Cherokee Nation in the early nineteenth century and the tragic outcome of these cases so critical to the establishment of U.S. federal Indian law.

Jill Norgren is Professor Emerita of government and legal studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is coauthor of Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law in a Liberal-Constitutional System and American Cultural Pluralism and Law and author of a forthcoming biography of Belva Lockwood.

Melvin I. Urofsky, professor of History and Constitutional Law at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the author or editor of several books, including A March of Liberty: A Constitution History of the United States, The Continuity of Change: The Supreme Court and Individual Liberties, and “Half Brother, Half Son”: The Letters of Louis D. Brandeis to Felix Frankfurter.