Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Wisconsin

Nineteenth-century treaties let Wisconsin tribes (plaintiffs) reserve hunting rights, including favored nighttime deer hunting, over land they ceded to the United States. Wisconsin banned night hunting except on the small reservations within that ceded territory, and a 1991 federal judgment upheld the ban as necessary for public safety. In the following decade, Wisconsin itself began having state employees and inexperienced contractors shoot deer at night to control overpopulation and disease, and hunting accidents actually dropped afterward, with only four nonhunters injured over five years (mostly self-inflicted hunter injuries) while vehicle-deer collisions caused far more harm than any night hunting did; neighboring states had also safely allowed treaty-territory night hunting for over a decade using safety courses run by the same regional fish and wildlife commission overseeing Wisconsin. Relying on this new safety record, plus tribes' own strong safety history hunting at night on their reservations, the tribes asked the court to vacate the 1991 judgment as obsolete, but the trial court still upheld the ban, reasoning state employees hunting at night was inherently less dangerous than tribal members doing so. The tribes appealed.