Court Opinion

ID: 9577035
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:31:03.968421+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:19:52.071047
License: Public Domain

SIMMS, Justice,
concurring in result:
Time has passed for this challenge to the State’s assertion of jurisdiction over the Tribe as barred by sovereign immunity. This Court’s decision in Aircraft I holding the Tribe subject to suit for money damages arising from breach of the Tribe’s contractual obligations is final and is the law of the case. The instant proceeding is brought only to enforce that judgment which is valid in all respects and is properly allowed by the Court.
The dissent’s reliance on Oklahoma Tax Comm’n. v. Citizen Band Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, 498 U.S. 505, 111 S.Ct. 905, 112 L.Ed.2d 1112 (1991), is misplaced as that decision does not involve questions regarding the effects of sovereign immunity on efforts of the State to enforce an existing judgment in its favor against an Indian tribe. Rather, Citizen Band concerns issues of the tribe’s immunity from suit by the state. It was this immunity from a lawsuit which the court was discussing as barring the State from its “most efficient remedy” in the particular quote set forth by the dissent. Neither that quotation nor the greater scope of the Court’s decision reached the question presented in the instant matter: whether the judgment entered against the Tribe in Aircraft I, which is final and valid, may now be enforced by means of ordinary judicial process by the district court which rendered it.