John Greil (University of Texas at Austin School of Law) has posted Some Optimism About Protecting Sacred Sites (1 Independent Law Journal 126 (2026)) (27 pages) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Review examines Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (2024), a major intervention in Indigenous sacred-sites scholarship. In Lyng v. Nw. Indian Cemetery Ass’n, the Supreme Court effectively held that government destruction of indigenous religious practices at a sacred site does not implicate the Free Exercise Clause if the government owns the land. Through a close reading of the Lyng litigation, including the trial transcripts, Lloyd analyzes the High Country at issue in Lyng as “home,” “property,” “sacred,” “wild,” and “kin,” and highlights the Yurok Tribal Council’s recent recognition of the Klamath River as a rights-bearing person with remedies in tribal court.
The review (1) presents and reconstructs the book’s argument on its own terms; (2) locates Land Is Kin as a first-of-its-kind settler-colonial intervention in a field recently dominated by postcolonial theory; (3) connects Lloyd’s critiques to Catholic social thought; and (4) advances a doctrinal case for optimism grounded in the Free Exercise Clause’s original public meaning and recent developments in the Supreme Court.
Here is a link to the book page for Land Is Kin, from the University Press of Kansas. It’s not my field, but I have not understood why government ownership of the land should have made a difference (from an originalist perspective) in Lyng.
Posted at 6:04 AM