Kevin K. Washburn

Kevin K. Washburn
12th Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs
In office October 9, 2012 – January 1, 2016
President	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Donald Laverdure (Acting)
Succeeded by	Lawrence S. Roberts (Acting)
Personal details
Born	Kevin K. Washburn August 9, 1967
Nationality	American, Chickasaw
Alma mater	University of Oklahoma (B.A.) Yale Law School (J.D.)
Profession	academic, attorney
Website	Assistant Secretary - Indian Affairs

Kevin K. Washburn (born 1967) is an American law professor and the former dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law.^[1] He served in the administration of President Barack Obama as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior from 2012 to 2016.^[2][3] Washburn has also been a federal prosecutor, a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, and the General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission. Washburn is a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, a federally-recognized Indian tribe.

Early Life and Education

Washburn was raised in Oklahoma City and small towns in Oklahoma, including Purcell, Heavener and Ada, and graduated from Moore High School, in Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City. He was raised along with two siblings by his mother, Shirley Duncan, who was single for much of his childhood. She eventually retired as a community health representative for the Chickasaw Nation and currently serves on the tribe's Council of Elders.^[4] Washburn went to college at the University of Oklahoma, where he majored in economics and minored in philosophy. After graduating with honors, Washburn began law school at Washington University (in St. Louis) where he was the inaugural Gustavus A. Buder Scholar. After his first year of law school, Washburn transferred to the Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation and received his law degree in 1993.

Career

Washburn began his legal career by clerking for Judge William C. Canby, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a noted scholar in the field of American Indian Law, former law professor, and author of the American Indian Law in a Nutshell.

Following his clerkship, Washburn was hired through the Attorney General's Honors Program as a trial attorney at the United States Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division. During his tenure there, Washburn successfully argued Montana v. EPA, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the decision of the Environmental Protection Agency to recognize the Salish and Kootenai Tribes as a state for purposes of setting water quality standards under the Clean Water Act.^[5] He also helped the Las Vegas Paiute Indian Tribe obtain water rights for a major development on the Snow Mountain Reservation, located northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, and litigated water rights cases on behalf of the United States in Arizona and Montana.

Washburn later served as an Assistant United States Attorney in New Mexico from 1997-2000,.^[6] Working in the Violent Crimes Section, he handled bank robberies, homicides, sexual assault and various other offenses, many of them arising in Indian country. His highest profile case was the prosecution of an offender who made threats against the United States District Court Judge John E. Conway and United States Magistrate Judge Robert DeGiacomo.

Washburn served as the third General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission from 2000 to 2002. He served during the legalization of the Indian gaming industry in California, a very active time at the Commission. Washburn improved the Commission's enforcement efforts by working to make the Commission's charging document, called a "notice of violation," more comprehensible to the public and the media by explaining the purpose for the rule with which the target was accused of violating. The use of such "speaking indictments" clarified the reasons that the NIGC was taking action and therefore improved public understanding of the NIGC enforcement priorities. Washburn also aggressively defended the independence of the Commission as an independent regulatory agency, strongly resisting efforts by officials of the Department of the Interior to embroil the NIGC in the longstanding Cobell class action litigation that ultimately was settled as Cobell v. Salazar.^[7]

Washburn began his academic career as a professor in 2002 at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he earned tenure in 2006. He spent the academic year of 2007-08 as the Oneida Nation Distinguished Visiting Professor of Indian Law at Harvard Law School. In 2008, he joined the law faculty at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, where he was the Rosenstiel Distinguished Professor of Law. Much of Washburn's scholarship focuses on the intersection of Federal Indian law and criminal law.^[8] In one of his articles, he focuses on the federal criminal justice system that applies on Indian reservations and the federal constitutional values of criminal procedure.^[9] In another piece, Washburn writes about the federalized criminal justice system and federal Indian policy involving Native American self-determination.^[10] His groundbreaking work in this field was discussed at length in a piece in the High Country News.^[11] In July 2008, Senator Byron Dorgan introduced S. 3320: Tribal Law and Order Act of 2008 in an attempt to fix some of the problems highlighted in Washburn's scholarship.^[12] The Tribal Law and Order Act was signed into law in 2010.

In 2009, Washburn was named dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law. He served as dean for more than three years. During this time, the School of Law celebrated the 60th anniversary of its first graduating class with a large celebration attended by more than 800 people and the release of a book entitled "60 for 60: Shaping Law in New Mexico Since 1950" which documented the law school community's influence in New Mexico.^[13] The 60 for 60 event was reflective of Dean Washburn's efforts to connect the law school with the broader community. Washburn's tenure was also marked by the successful recruitment of several high value faculty members to the law school, in part, by raising all faculty salaries during a time of shrinking fiscal resources. These recruits included George Bach, Yael Cannon, Max Minzner, Aliza Organick, Dawinder "Dave" Sidhu and Alex Ritchie. Dean Washburn hired Ritchie to establish the law school's oil & gas program, to provide more opportunity for communities and students from the oil-rich San Juan and Permian Basins to engage better with the school. During Washburn's tenure, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan^[14] and Sonya Sotomayor^[15] visited the School of Law, and Ninth Circuit Judge Mary Murguia gave the inaugural Dennis Chavez Memorial Lecture.^[16] The Chavez Lecture was established, during Washburn's deanship, through a gift from the Senator's family.^[17] Washburn also helped to bring numerous other significant gifts to the law school to support students and faculty, substantially increasing giving. These included the Daniels Diploma, the Salazar Prize^[18] and the Bailey Scholarship in Law.^[19] Dean Washburn also helped strengthen the relationship with the New Mexico courts, especially the Court of Appeals, which located to a new building next door to the School of Law during Washburn's deanship. The New Mexico Court of Appeals is the only appellate court in the United States that is located full-time on a law school campus.^[20] Washburn also oversaw substantial renovations at the School of Law, including courtrooms, classrooms, the clinic, and the Law Library.^[21]

In 2012, Washburn was nominated by President Obama to be the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior. He was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate on September 21, 2012, and was sworn into office by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on October 9, 2012. He served in that position until December 31, 2015, when he returned to the University of New Mexico as a faculty member.^[22] He was the twelfth Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs to be confirmed since the position was established by Congress in the late 1970s. He was preceded by Larry Echo Hawk and succeeded by Lawrence S. Roberts (acting). In addition to carrying out the Department’s trust responsibilities regarding the management of tribal and individual Indian trust lands and assets, the Assistant Secretary is responsible for promoting the self-determination and economic self-sufficiency of the nation’s 567 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and their approximately two million enrolled members.^[23]

Washburn is also one of the country's leading experts on Gaming and Gambling Law. He served as the General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) from January 2000 to July 2002.^[24] In addition, he is the author of a law school casebook on Gaming Law and Regulation published by Aspen Publishers in 2011. He frequently testifies before Congress and the courts on issues involving Indian gaming. While visiting at Harvard Law School during the 2007-08 academic year, Professor Washburn taught the first course on Gaming/Gambling Law in that school’s history.^[25] Professor Washburn has taught Gaming/Gambling Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Harvard Law School, the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, and the University of New Mexico School of Law.

Washburn is also an expert in Federal Indian Law. He has been an author of one of the principal casebooks on Federal Indian Law, entitled American Indian Law: Native Nations and the Federal System. He is also an author/editor of Indian Law Stories, a book that provides the back stories of several key American Indian law cases. In addition, he is an author and member of the Executive Board of Editors of Felix Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, the leading treatise in the field of Federal Indian Law.

Washburn is married to Libby Rodke Washburn, who is currently serving as the chief of staff to the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and they have two children.

Affiliations

Elected member of the American Law Institute since 2007; Board of Trustees 2006-09 of the Law School Admission Council; Executive Editor of Felix Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law since 2005; Member of the Criminal Law and Procedure Drafting Committee for the National Conference of Bar Examiners 2006-15; Yale Law School Fund Board of Directors 1998-2004; Enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, a federally recognized Indian nation.^[26]

See also

• Bureau of Indian Affairs

References

External links

• Scholarly Articles
• Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program