Riyaz Kanji

Jimcy McGirt, a Seminole citizen convicted in Oklahoma's courts, contended that his crimes had occurred within the Creek reservation and belonged in federal court. Kanji had first argued the Nation's position on November 27, 2018 in Carpenter v. Murphy, which Oklahoma brought after the Tenth Circuit held in 2017 that the reservation had never been disestablished. On July 9, 2020 the Court ruled for McGirt, 5 to 4. Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion began, "On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise," and held that the reservation in eastern Oklahoma remained Indian country for purposes of the Major Crimes Act. Only Congress could disestablish it; demographic change and the passage of time could not substitute, and "unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law." The opinion closed, "Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word." The same day the Court affirmed the Tenth Circuit's judgment in Murphy's case for the reasons given in McGirt. Kanji described counsel's work as telling the truth about the Nation's existing governance of land it had never lawfully lost.

Barrier Culverts

In 2001 twenty-one tribes and the United States asked the federal court in Seattle, within the long-running United States v. Washington, to hold that the Stevens Treaties of the 1850s, which secured "the right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations," were violated by state-built culverts, the pipes carrying streams beneath roads, that blocked salmon from hundreds of miles of habitat and diminished the runs on which the treaty right depends. Kanji was co-counsel for the western Washington tribes. Judge Ricardo S. Martinez ruled for the tribes in 2007, and in 2013, after a trial on the remedy, he ordered the State to correct its high-priority barrier culverts, those with more than 200 meters of salmon habitat upstream, within seventeen years, and the rest when they wore out or their roads were rebuilt; about 817 state-owned barrier culverts had been identified.

Washington argued that the treaty right "imposes no obligation on the State to ensure that any fish will, in fact, be available," that the federal government had designed and permitted the culverts, and that the injunction required replacement even where other barriers blocked the fish. A Ninth Circuit panel of Judges William A. Fletcher, Ronald M. Gould and David A. Ezra held that the tribes had been promised enough fish to provide a "moderate living" and that their right of access to their fishing places "would be worthless without harvestable fish," and it held the State responsible for its culverts whoever had designed them. On June 11, 2018 the Supreme Court, with Justice Anthony Kennedy recused, affirmed by an equally divided Court, and the injunction and its multiyear construction program stood.

Turtle Creek and Buffalo

For the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians he argued the Turtle Creek case, in which the Sixth Circuit held on May 24, 2004 that the Band had been "restored to Federal recognition" and could conduct gaming on the site. As lead counsel for the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians in Kelsey v. Pope, he won a Sixth Circuit decision on January 5, 2016 upholding the Band's criminal jurisdiction over one of its own members for conduct outside Indian country, grounded in the inherent sovereignty that predates the United States. As lead counsel for the Seneca Nation in Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County v. Chaudhuri, he defended the Indian-country status of the Nation's lands in Buffalo and the legality of its gaming facility, and the Second Circuit affirmed in 2015. He was co-counsel for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, in which the federal courts allowed a civil tort claim against a non-Indian business operating on tribal trust land to proceed in tribal court; the Supreme Court divided evenly in 2016, leaving the Fifth Circuit's judgment in place.

Evergreen Legal Services

Kanji graduated from Harvard College in 1986 and from Yale Law School in 1991, where he served on the Law Journal and won the Potter Stewart Prize in moot court, and he clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit and for Justice David Souter. As a Skadden Fellow at Evergreen Legal Services in Seattle he spent two years on the treaty shellfishing proceedings in United States v. Washington under the same Stevens Treaties, and after several years at Williams & Connolly in Washington he co-founded Kanji & Katzen, which represents tribal nations in disputes over land, natural resources, gaming and the authority of tribal, state and federal governments, enforcing the United States' treaty commitments and the sovereignty the nations retain, from offices in Ann Arbor and Seattle. He directs the Ann Arbor office. He is a principal advisor to the Tribal Supreme Court Project, which coordinates strategy on which cases reach the Court and how the issues are presented; he took an active part in its formation and has given it hundreds of hours of pro bono time. He has taught Native American law at the University of Michigan and has testified before Congress on domestic violence in Indian country and land-into-trust reform.

The 2023 Decree

He returned to Great Lakes treaty litigation as counsel of record for four tribes defending the 2023 Great Lakes Fishing Decree, which governs commercial, subsistence and sport fishing in the treaty waters of Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior and was negotiated among tribal, federal and state governments to protect treaty-reserved fishing rights while conserving a stressed fishery. In March 2025 the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court's authority to enter the decree over the objection of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, which then petitioned the Supreme Court in No. 25-165. On December 3, 2025 Kanji and his colleagues filed the joint tribal brief in opposition for the Bay Mills Indian Community, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and on January 12, 2026 the Supreme Court denied review, leaving the Sixth Circuit's judgment and the 2023 decree in place.