Page "Felix S. Cohen" Paragraph 3

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration brought Cohen from academic study to public service.

Cohen worked in the Solicitor's Office of the Department of the Interior from 1933 – 1947.

In this position, Cohen was the primary legal architect of the Indian New Deal, a federal policy that sought to strengthen tribal governments and reduce federal domination of Indian tribes.

Cohen was the drafter of the centerpiece legislation of this era, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.

In 1939 he became Chief of the Indian Law Survey, an effort to compile the federal laws and treaties regarding American Indians.

The resulting book, published in 1941 as The Handbook of Federal Indian Law, became much more than a simple survey.

The Handbook was the first to show how hundreds of years of diverse treaties, statutes, and decisions formed a comprehensive whole.

Today, Cohen is credited with creating the modern field of Federal Indian Law.

Although the treatise began as a joint project between the Department of Interior and the Department of Justice, Justice fired Cohen from the project and terminated the survey.

The motivations of Justice are not entirely clear.

Cohen seemed to believe that anti-Semitism was at play, but there were also substantial ideological differences between Cohen and his supervisors at Justice.

Justice may have been concerned that the book would be too powerful a tool for Indian tribes.

Ultimately, the book was published, but under the auspices of Interior alone.

For this work, Cohen received the department's Distinguished Service Award in 1948.

The University of New Mexico reissued the initial Handbook in 1971, and updated versions of the Handbook were published in 1982 and 2005.