Kevin K. Washburn (born 1967) is a Chickasaw law professor and former dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law, and the University of Iowa College of Law. He served in the administration of President Barack Obama as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior from 2012 to 2016. Washburn has also been a federal prosecutor, a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, and the General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission. Washburn is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, a federally recognized Native American tribe.
Early life and education Kevin Washburn was born on August 9, 1967. His mother, Shirley Stark (née Wallace), raised him in Oklahoma City and small towns in Oklahoma, including Purcell, Heavener, and Ada. He graduated from Moore High School, in Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City. Washburn came from an underprivileged background. Washburn discussed his childhood and mother in a speech given upon receiving the Spirit of Excellence Award from the American Bar Association. His mother, who was single for much of his childhood, raised him and his two siblings. She eventually retired as a community health representative for the Chickasaw Nation and currently serves on the tribe's Council of Elders. Washburn went to college at the University of Oklahoma, where he majored in economics and minored in philosophy. After graduating with honors in 1989, Washburn began law school at Washington University in St. Louis where he was the inaugural Gustavus A. Buder Scholar. After his first year of law school, Washburn transferred to the Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation and received his J.D. degree in 1993.
Career Washburn began his legal career by clerking for Judge William C. Canby Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a scholar in the field of Native American Law, former law professor, and author of American Indian Law in a Nutshell.
Washburn was hired through the Attorney General's Honors Program as a trial attorney at the United States Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division. During his tenure there, Washburn successfully argued Montana v. EPA, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the decision of the Environmental Protection Agency to recognize the Salish and Kootenai Tribes as a state for purposes of setting water quality standards under the Clean Water Act.Montana v. EPA, 137 F.3d 1135 (9th Cir. 1998). He also helped the Las Vegas Paiute Native American Tribe obtain water rights for a major development on the Snow Mountain Reservation, located northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.
From 1997 to 2000 Washburn served as an Assistant United States Attorney in New Mexico. Working in the Violent Crimes Section, he handled homicides, sexual assault, bank robberies, and various other offenses, many of them arising in Native American country. His highest profile case was the successful prosecution of an offender who made threats against United States District Court Judge John E. Conway and United States Magistrate Judge Robert DeGiacomo.
National Indian Gaming Commission From 2000 to 2002, Washburn served as the third General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission. He served during the time of tremendous growth in the Native American gaming industry in California as that gaming became authorized by the signing of tribal-state gaming compacts, a very active time at the commission.Kevin Washburn, Agency Culture and Conflict: Federal Implementation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act by the National Indian Gaming Commission, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Department of Justice, 42 Arizona State Law Journal 303 (2010) As general counsel, Washburn made several reforms. First, on hearing complaints from the industry suggesting that agency staff were abusing power in the management contract review process by demanding changes to contracts that were not required by law, Washburn changed the review process by requiring staff to identify statutory or regulatory authority for any objection that agency staff made to a proposed management contract under review. Second, Washburn improved the commission's enforcement efforts by working to make the commission's document charging a regulatory violation, called a "notice of violation," more comprehensible to the public. Washburn required that such notices be written to explain the purpose for the rule which the target was accused of violating. The use of such "speaking indictments" clarified the reasons that the NIGC was taking action and therefore improved public understanding of the NIGC enforcement priorities. Washburn also aggressively defended the independence of the commission as an independent regulatory agency, strongly resisting efforts by officials of the Department of the Interior to embroil the NIGC in the longstanding Cobell class action litigation that ultimately was settled as Cobell v. Salazar. Third, Washburn helped the NIGC establish, over the strong objections of the Department of Justice, the right of tribal nations to conduct Class II gaming with technological aids that helped maintain a strong revenue source for tribes and gave them more leverage in negotiations with states over revenue sharing.
University of Minnesota Law School, 2002-2009 Washburn began his academic career as a professor in 2002 at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he earned tenure in 2006. He spent the academic year of 2007–08 as the Oneida Nation Distinguished Visiting professor of Native American Law at Harvard Law School. In 2008, he joined the law faculty at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, where he was the Rosenstiel Distinguished Professor of Law. Washburn has also taught short courses at the University of Montana School of Law and the University of Nebraska College of Law.
Much of Washburn's scholarship focuses on the intersection of federal Native American law and criminal law. In one of his articles, he focuses on the federal criminal justice system that applies on Native American reservations and the federal constitutional values of criminal procedure. In another piece, Washburn writes about the federalized criminal justice system and federal Native American policy involving Native American self-determination. His groundbreaking work in this field was discussed at length in a piece in the High Country News. In July 2008, Senator Byron Dorgan introduced S. 3320: Tribal Law and Order Act of 2008 in an attempt to fix some of the problems identified in Washburn's scholarship. The Tribal Law and Order Act was signed into law in 2010.
University of New Mexico School of Law, 2009-2012 In 2009, Washburn was named dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law from 2009 to 2012. In 2010, the School of Law celebrated the 60th anniversary of its first graduating class with a celebration attended by more than 800 people and the release of a book entitled "60 for 60: Shaping Law in New Mexico Since 1950" which documented the law school community's influence in New Mexico. The 60 for 60 event was reflective of Dean Washburn's efforts to connect the law school with the broader community. Washburn's tenure was marked by the successful recruitment of several high-value faculty members to the law school, in part, by raising all faculty salaries during a time of shrinking fiscal resources. These recruits included George Bach, Cannon, Max Minzner, Aliza Organick, Dawinder "Dave" Sidhu, Kevin Tu and Alex Ritchie. Washburn hired Ritchie to establish the law school's "oil & gas program", to provide more opportunity for communities and students from the San Juan and Permian Basin regions to engage better with the school. During Washburn's tenure, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor visited the School of Law, and Ninth Circuit Judge Mary Murguia gave the inaugural Senator Dennis Chavez Memorial Lecture. The Chavez Lecture was established, during Washburn's deanship, through a gift from the Senator's family. Washburn helped to bring numerous other significant gifts to the law school to support students and faculty, such as the Daniels Diploma, the Salazar Prize, the Bailey Scholarship in Law, and the Hart Chair. Under Washburn's leadership, annual giving to the School of Law also increased dramatically. Washburn helped strengthen the relationship with the New Mexico courts, especially the Court of Appeals, which relocated to a new building next door to the School of Law during Washburn's deanship.
The UNM School of Law's curricular offerings expanded during Washburn's tenure. In addition to the oil & gas program, the School of Law developed a semester in Washington D.C. program, spearheaded by then-Associate Dean Barbara Bergman, as well as an Innocence and Justice Project program designed to use DNA evidence to free the wrongfully convicted, funded by a significant grant from the U.S. Department of Justice obtained by then-Associate Dean April Land. Washburn also obtained a grant from then-Governor Bill Richardson to fund a DWI-DV Prosecution-in-Practice class in which students prosecute cases of domestic violence and driving while intoxicated.
Obama Administration, 2012-2016 Washburn left the UNM deanship in the fall of 2012, when President Barack Obama appointed him to serve as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Following a confirmation hearing, he was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate on September 21, 2012, and was sworn into office by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on October 9, 2012, serving in that position until January 1, 2016, when he returned to the University of New Mexico as a faculty member. He was the twelfth Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs to be confirmed since the position was established by Congress in the late 1970s. He was preceded by Larry Echo Hawk and succeeded by Lawrence S. Roberts (acting). In addition to carrying out the department's trust responsibilities regarding the management of tribal and individual Native American trust lands and assets, the Assistant Secretary is responsible for promoting the self-determination and economic self-sufficiency of the nation's 567 federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native tribes and their approximately two million enrolled members. As Assistant Secretary, Washburn helped organize the White House Tribal Nations Conferences for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, in which President Obama invited leaders from each Native American tribe to Washington, D.C., to meet with the President directly and with his cabinet. Washburn also oversaw the establishment of the White House Council of Native American Affairs by President Obama.
Washburn's leadership at the Department of the Interior was marked by significant policy accomplishments, such as initiatives designed to preempt state taxation of business activity in Native American country to enhance tribal economic development, a reversal of the department's rule against taking land in trust for Alaska tribes, more than half a million acres of new lands taken into trust for tribes, and more than 1.5 million acres of fractionated interests in existing trust lands restored to tribes.
Washburn also worked to reform and improve numerous BIA regulatory regimes, related to rights-of-way, Native American child welfare, the federal acknowledgment process for Native American tribes, tribal jurisdiction, and Secretarial elections. Washburn described his philosophy at a lecture at UCLA in 2014.