Glossary · entry 08 / 12
Sovereign immunity
Sovereign immunity is a tribe's legal protection from being sued without its consent, a core feature of tribal sovereignty. Complete, provable records help a tribe act within and document that authority.
Tribal sovereign immunity predates the United States and survives it: a tribe can be sued only where Congress has abrogated the immunity or the tribe has clearly waived it, often in a specific contract or ordinance.
Records are where immunity questions get decided in practice. Whether a waiver was validly enacted, whether an official acted within delegated authority, and what the council actually resolved all come down to what the record shows.
A record that proves itself, attributed, sealed, and complete, is the strongest position a government can argue from.