Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/18pdf/17-532_q86b.pdf
Page Number: 14

Cite as:  587 U. S. ____ (2019) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

treaty  rights  to  suggest  that  they  can  be  extinguished  by 
implication at statehood.”  Ibid. 

Even Wyoming concedes that the Court has rejected the
equal-footing  reasoning  in  Race  Horse,  Brief  for  Respond-
ent 26, but the State contends that Mille Lacs reaffirmed 
the  alternative  holding  in  Race  Horse  that  the  Shoshone-
Bannock  Treaty  right  (and  thus  the  identically  phrased 
right  in  the  1868  Treaty  with  the  Crow  Tribe)  was  in- 
tended  to  end  at  statehood.    We  are  unpersuaded.  As  ex-
plained above, although the decision in Mille Lacs did not 
explicitly say that it was overruling the alternative ground 
in  Race  Horse,  it  is  impossible  to  harmonize  Mille  Lacs’ 
analysis with the Court’s prior reasoning in Race Horse.1 

We  thus  formalize  what  is  evident  in  Mille  Lacs  itself. 
While  Race  Horse  “was  not  expressly  overruled”  in  Mille 
Lacs,  “it  must  be  regarded  as  retaining  no  vitality”  after
that decision.  Limbach v. Hooven & Allison Co., 466 U. S. 
353, 361 (1984).  To avoid any future confusion, we make 
clear today  that  Race  Horse is repudiated to the extent it
held  that  treaty  rights  can  be  impliedly  extinguished  at 
statehood. 

B 

Because  this  Court’s  intervening  decision  in  Mille  Lacs 
repudiated  the  reasoning  on  which  the  Tenth  Circuit 
relied  in  Repsis,  Repsis  does  not  preclude  Herrera  from
arguing  that  the  1868  Treaty  right  survived  Wyoming’s
statehood. 

Under  the  doctrine  of  issue  preclusion,  “a  prior  judg-
ment  . . .  foreclos[es]  successive  litigation  of  an  issue  of 

—————— 

1 Notably,  the  four  Justices  who  dissented  in  Mille  Lacs  protested
that  the  Court  “effectively  overrule[d]  Race  Horse  sub  silentio.”    526 
U. S.,  at  219  (Rehnquist,  C. J.,  dissenting).    Others  have  agreed  with 
this assessment.  See, e.g., State v. Buchanan, 138 Wash. 2d 186, 211– 
212, 978 P. 2d 1070, 1083 (1999) (“[T]he United States Supreme Court
effectively overruled Race Horse in Minnesota v. Mille Lacs”).