Case Highlight: Florida Court of Appeals

Because everyone loves reading about ICWA on a Friday afternoon!

In actuality, this will be a pretty short post. While I'm proud to say the Indian Law Clinic provided assistance in this case, my analysis will necessarily be limited to the language of the published opinion.

I want to highlight a couple of things:

1. The first is the court finds no timing limit on the right of intervention. While most courts have held ICWA applies prospectively--in other words, from the time a court knows or has reason to know an Indian child is involved in the case--there has been very little case law on how that works in the appellate process (ok, yes, virtually no case law on this). Does a termination of parental rights proceeding end at the time of the order, or is it ongoing through the appeal of that same proceeding? The court held the intervention section of ICWA (1911(c)) "makes no distinction between trial-level and appellate-level proceeding." So long as the termination of parental rights action is on-going, such as in an appeal, the right to intervene persists--"The Tribe has a federal statutory right to intervene at any point in the proceeding, including post-judgment but before finality."
2. For my standard of review nerds out there--the appellate court reviewed the application of ICWA under a de novo standard but found the trial court's denial of intervention met the abuse of discretion standard.
3. The opinion also has some nice preemption language if people need it, especially in Florida, where there is no state ICWA law.

This Florida case provides novel precedent and reasoning to support tribes seeking to participate in appeals involving their children, one of my big areas of interest.