2004 to 2018 · Indigenous rights
Standing Rock and the Lakota People’s Law Project
The Romero Institute launched the Lakota People’s Law Project in 2004 to enforce the Indian Child Welfare Act in South Dakota. As its chief counsel, Danny Sheehan later represented Standing Rock water protector Chase Iron Eyes.
The Lakota People’s Law Project
The Lakota People’s Law Project began as a Romero Institute program working with Lakota communities in South Dakota, where Native children were being removed from their families and placed in non-Native foster care at high rates despite the Indian Child Welfare Act. Danny served as its chief counsel. The project became an independent organization in 2024.
Standing Rock
In 2016 and 2017 thousands of people gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline. On February 1, 2017 Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota attorney and activist, was arrested at a protest camp and charged with felony inciting a riot. Danny led his defense, which sought to raise a necessity defense and to obtain evidence about the private security firms and law enforcement agencies policing the protests. In 2018 prosecutors dropped the felony charges.
Danny’s 2019 UCSC course, The Trajectory of Justice in America, used Standing Rock as a case study of the conflict over climate change.
Watch Danny’s lectures on this case
- Standing Rock as a microcosm of the climate change debate (2019)
- Oil = money = power (2019)
- Strategies of resistance: Mueller and Standing Rock (2019)
From his UCSC lecture series. All lectures.