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42 Alaska L. Rev. i (2025-2026)

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          NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

     The Alaska Law Review is pleased to present our December 2025 issue,
the first in our forty-second volume. I am deeply proud of our Alaska Law
Review members' continued commitment  to the Alaska legal community.
This  year, our  members   traveled to  Anchorage   and  Fairbanks,
strengthening  connections  and  building  new  relationships with
practitioners, academics, judges, and judicial clerks throughout the state.
Now  more than ever, genuine connections are essential to open pathways
for shared  knowledge,  coordinated problem-solving, and  collective
resilience.
     We would  like to thank not only the practitioners who submitted
pieces for publication, but also everyone who offered their time and
expertise on Alaskan law. This includes many of you who  graciously
opened  your homes  to us, volunteered to meet with  our team, and
provided thoughtful guidance to our student editors on their notes. This
work  would not be possible without your assistance. This issue features
four articles and two student notes.
     Our first article is titled The Corpus Juris of (Alaska Native) Inherent
Tribal Sovereignty by Nazune Menka, Assistant Professor of Law and
Faculty Director of the Northwest Center for Indigenous Law (NCIL) at
Seattle University School of Law. Menka argues that federal courts should
apply the corpus juris, or whole body of law, canon of interpretation,
including the in pari materia or affiliated statutes canon, to produce a more
coherent and principled body of Indigenous law. Throughout the article,
Menka  demonstrates how  Alaska Native nations have been particularly
impacted by the explicit and implicit diminishment of traditional ways of
life and critiques judicial tendencies to implicitly divest tribal sovereignty.
The author reframes Alaska Native sovereignty as continuous, resilient,
and legally supported when  statutes are read as a part of the broader
federal-Tribal legal framework.
     Next, Jon W. Katchen and Will R. Crowther address the changing
administrative law landscape in their article Anchoring Deference: The
Chevron  Doctrine, Loper Bright, and Alaska Administrative Law. The article
illustrates how Loper Bright creates an opportunity for Alaskan courts to
address the state's disjointed administrative law jurisprudence. Katchen
and  Crowther  explain that Alaska never adopted Chevron deference,
instead relying on a mix  of reasonable basis and substitution of
judgment  tests that have produced  inconsistent and unpredictable
outcomes. But now, the authors believe that the Alaska Supreme Court