By Chris Hoenig
Lost in the maze of landmark Supreme Court decisions this week (affirmative action on Monday, voting rights on Tuesday, same-gender marriage on Wednesday) was a case that didn’t include anyone’s name: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. In it, the justices ruled by a 5-to-4 margin to return a young girl to her adoptive parents in South Carolina, dismissing the legal claim of her biological father, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation.
The case centered on the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law passed in 1978 to prevent American Indian children from being taken from their homes and adopted by non-American Indian families. The claim by the biological father relies on generations of ancestry—the baby girl is 3/256ths Cherokee—in asking the court to apply the law and keep the girl with her father.
