C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma
2001 United States Supreme Court case
C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, 532 U.S. 411 (2001), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the tribe waived its sovereign immunity when it agreed to a contract containing an arbitration agreement.
Background
In 1993, the Citizen Band Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma entered into a contract with C & L Enterprises, Inc. to install a roof on a tribally owned building that was not on reservation land. Prior to the work being performed under the contract, the Potawatomi decided to use a different type of roof, re-bid the job and selected another contractor to install the roof.
The contract used with C & L Enterprises was provided by the tribe and contained both an arbitration clause and a choice of law clause. C & L then sought to enforce the arbitration clause and the tribe claimed sovereign immunity. The arbitrator ruled in favor of C & L and C & L filed suit to enforce the judgment in the District Court of Oklahoma County.
The trial court denied the tribes motion to dismiss based upon sovereign immunity and the tribe appealed.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma” is 2001 United States Supreme Court case. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Enterprises, Citizen and Band, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5015033. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.