This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 1st, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

It was a heartbreaking case all around known simply as adoptive couple, the baby girl.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses the Supreme Court's ruling

and what it means for adoptive and biological parents and the institution of family law.

This was a case widely agreed to be heartbreaking which arose under the Indian Child

Welfare Act of 1978.

That was a bill passed by Congress after there had been reports

that states were too easily taking kids away from Indian parents, declaring the parents unfit, putting

them out for adoption of foster care.

And so the law says that before any kid with who is even eligible for membership in a tribe

and that's an interesting term of art can have the parental rights cut off or

can have custody switched to non-parents, there have to be a bunch

of special procedures in which the tribe has to be given a right to get involved.

Now this case came up in Oklahoma when a woman of Hispanic background got pregnant.

The father, it turned out, was 3, 128th percent Cherokee, but enrolled in the Cherokee Nation.

And that meant that he was about 2.something percent Indian and the little girl around whom the case revolved was like 1.2% Indian.

The facts are somewhat disputed but the courts have generally accepted the version that he relinquished his rights,

that he made no effort to support the baby and she assumed that the way was clear for

adoption nonetheless knowing that he had some Indian background her

lawyers for the adoption and she landed up an adoptive couple in South Carolina

contacted the Cherokee Nation, but he used several misspellings of his name and they checked the wrong name.

So through no one's fault necessarily, the Indian tribe missed the chance to notice

...