Berger on Rosalind's Refund: The Woman, the Lawyers, and the Time That Created McClanahan v. Arizona

Bethany Berger, University of Iowa College of Law, is publishing Rosalind's Refund: The Woman, the Lawyers, and the Time that Created McClanahan v. Arizona in the Kansas Law Review (2025). Here is the abstract.

Rosalind McClanahan was just twenty-two when she set one of the most important cases in federal Indian law into motion. On April 1, 1968, she filed her Arizona tax return, along with a protest that all the money withheld from her pay—$16.29—should be refunded because she was a Navajo citizen whose income was earned entirely on the Navajo reservation. The Arizona Tax Commission ignored her claim and the Arizona courts rejected it. But the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in her favor, building a foundation for many more decisions rebuffing state jurisdiction as well as landmark legislation such as the Indian Child Welfare Act and Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. This Essay, the first full history of McClanahan, examines the origins of the decision as part of the Kansas Law Review’s symposium on impact litigation in Indian country. Rosalind McClanahan was born in an era of renewed pressure for Indian assimilation but came of age as tribes and Indigenous people increasingly insisted on self-determination. This moment had a direct influence on her case: her education at Window Rock High School (where she was elected Class Treasurer) resulted from new pathways to challenge Indian exclusion from public schools; her employer was the First Navajo National Bank, which opened in 1962 as the first bank on the 16-million-acre Navajo Nation; and her lawyers came from Diné be’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’diit’ahii-Legal Services (shortened to “DNA”), which the Navajo Nation brought to the reservation as part of a new wave of federally funded organizations providing legal services to the poor. Each of these developments shaped both the decision and its impact.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.