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You can search Smith & Jolly's Indian Law Updates by simply entering one or more search terms (the words or phrase that best describe the information you are looking for) into the search box on our articles page and hitting the 'Enter' key on your keyboard or clicking the Search button. Results that match your search terms will be presented with the most relevant results displayed first.

These are some basic tips to help you maximize the effectiveness of your search:

In addition, you can use our Advanced Search page to help refine your search by clicking on "Advanced Search" near the standard search field.

Capitalization

Searching Smith & Jolly's Indian Law Updates is NOT case sensitive. In other words, all letters, regardless of how you type them, will be considered as lower case. For instance, searches for indian law, Indian Law, and iNdIaN lAw will all return the same results.

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Use of "and"

By default, searching our Indian Law Updates only returns pages that include all of your search terms. Thus, there is no need to include "and" between your search terms. For example, searching for Indian law will return the same results as searching for Indian and law.

The only exceptions to this are when you group words in parentheses or include an author specific search. In those cases, words inside the parentheses or in the author search are treated as if there is an "OR" between them. If you want to require a word in a group of words in parentheses or in an author search, place a plus sign (+) immediately in front of the word, such as (+Indian law) (which would retrieve Indian law updates with both Indian and law or just Indian) or by:"Jolly +Smith" (which would retrieve articles by someone with both Smith and Jolly in their name or Smith and anything else in their name).

NOTE: If you place a plus sign (+) in front of a word, make sure there is a space in front of it.

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Use of "or"

If you want to search for either of two words or phrases, you can put an "OR" between them. Thus, Indian law OR gaming would search for Indian law updates with the word "Indian" and either "law" or "gaming" or both.

NOTE: When you use OR, the word or phrase on either side of the OR will be considered optional.

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Phrase Search

If you are looking for an exact phrase, simply put double quotation marks (") around your search terms or the part of your search you want treated as an exact phrase. For example, a search for "Indian gaming" would only return results that included the exact phrase "Indian gaming."

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Excluding Words

If you want to make sure that any results that are returned DO NOT include certain terms, you can put a minus sign (-) in front of them. For instance, if you wanted only results about Indian law, but not about gaming, you could search for Indian law -gaming. If you exclude terms, you must also include some words. For instance, if you attempt to search for -Indian or -Indian -law, no results will be returned.

NOTE: When you want to exclude a term in your search, be sure to include a space before the minus sign.

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Word variations/Stemming

When you search our Indian Law Updates, words are automatically stemmed. Thus, when appropriate, your search will look for not only the exact words you type, but also for words similar to the ones you type. For example, if you search for Indian, articles containing the word "Indians" will also be returned. Similarly, a search for legislation would include "legislate," "legislating," "legislated," "legislature," and so forth.

To prevent stemming of your search terms, you can include them in double quotes (") the same as a phrase. If words or phrases are in double quotes, our search engine assumes you only want the precise words inside the double quotes. For example, to only search for legislature and no variations of it, enter your search term as "legislature" and only that exact word will be looked for.

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Grouping terms

You can group words together in parentheses and use boolean operators in front of the parentheses to tell our search engine whether the words or phrases inside the parentheses are optional, required, or should be excluded. Unlike the standard implied "and" in searches, words or phrases in parentheses without any boolean operator in front of them are treated as optional. For instance, a search for Indian (law gaming) would return results with "Indian" and "law" as well as results with "Indian" and "gaming".

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Special Author Search

You can also limit your search to only Indian law updates posted or written by particular members of the firm. To do this, use the operator "by:" followed by the name you want to search for. If you want to search for more than one name, place all of the names in double quotes ("). For instance, by:Smith and by:Smith Jolly would only search for articles where the name of the person who posted it includes Smith. However, by:"Smith Jolly" would search for articles where the name of the person who posted it includes either Smith or Jolly. When searching by author, the search looks for any of the words in quotes after the "by:" operator or, if no quotes are included, the first word after the "by:" operator.

Boolean searches are supported within the "by:" operator by using a minus sign (-) to exclude a word or phrase or a plus sign (+) in front of mandatory words. However, phrases within the "by:" operator are not supported and stemming is not done. Also, unlike the standard implied "and" in searches, words without any boolean operator in front of them are treated as optional. The "by:" operator is treated separately from other search terms, so boolean operators in front of the "by:" operator are ignored. Thus, by:"-Smith Jolly" would retrieve Indian law updates by someone with Jolly in their name, but not Smith and by:"Smith Jolly" would retrieve Indian law updates by anyone with either Smith or Jolly in their name as would -by:"Smith Jolly" since the minus before the "by:" operator would be ignored. You should note that, as with excluding words generally, if you only exclude words (i.e., by:"-Smith"), no results will be retrieved.

NOTE: When you use the "by:" operator, there should be no space after the colon (:).

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Ignoring Common Words

When searching our Indian law updates, certain common words and certain characters like "#," "*," and "&" are excluded because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results.

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INDIAN LAW UPDATES

Federal Court Decides Yankton Reservation not Disestablished

The Federal Court for the District of South Dakota has held that the Yankton Sioux Reservation has not been disestablished and remains under the jurisdiction of the Tribal and federal governments. The... more »

Indian Affairs Committee Approves Artman Again

On Thursday, after its confirmation hearing of Carl Artman for the position of Assistant Secretary Indian Affairs, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs once again approved the Bush Administration's nomination... more »

Pit River Tribe v. United States Forest Service, 9th Cir. 2006

The Pit River Tribe and other plaintiffs won a significant victory in the Ninth Circuit for Indian religious freedom. On November 6, 2006, the Ninth Circuit reversed the Eastern District of California's... more »

Indian Affairs Committee Approves Artman

On September 14, 2006, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee unanimously approved Carl Artman's nomination as Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs. The full Senate is expected to confirm Artman without any... more »