The Boney Courthouse building in Anchorage holds the Alaska Supreme Court chambers. (Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
The Boney Courthouse building in Anchorage holds the Alaska Supreme Court chambers. (Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

The Alaska Supreme Court overturned a 20-year-old precedent Friday by ruling that Alaska Native tribal organizations can more easily receive the kind of sovereign legal immunity that individual tribes have.

Friday’s 4-1 decision means the tribal consortiums that provide health care for tens of thousands of Alaskans — both Native and non-Native — are largely immune from civil lawsuits in…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...