Nevada v. Hicks, 533 U.S. 353, 19 (2001)

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Cite as: 533 U. S. 353 (2001)

Opinion of the Court

minative effect "fails to consider adequately the Tribe's inherent sovereign interests in activities on their land," post, at 401 (opinion of O'Connor, J.), is an exaggeration.

The concurrence marshals no authority and scant reasoning to support its judgment that tribal authority over state officers pursuing, on tribe-owned land, off-reservation violations of state law may be "necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control internal relations." Montana, 450 U. S., at 564-565. Self-government and internal relations are not directly at issue here, since the issue is whether the Tribes' law will apply, not to their own members, but to a narrow category of outsiders. And the concurrence does not try to explain how allowing state officers to pursue off-reservation violation of state law "threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity, the economic security, or the health or welfare of the tribe," id., at 566. That the actions of these state officers cannot threaten or affect those interests is guaranteed by the limitations of federal constitutional and statutory law to which the officers are fully subject.

The concurrence exaggerates and distorts the consequences of our conclusion, supra, at 359, n. 3, that the term "other arrangements" in a passage from Montana referred to other "private consensual" arrangements—so that it did not include the state officials' obtaining of tribal warrants in the present case. That conclusion is correct, as a fuller exposition of the passage from Montana makes clear:

"To be sure, Indian tribes retain inherent sovereign power to exercise some forms of civil jurisdiction over non-Indians on their reservations, even on non-Indian fee lands. A tribe may regulate, through taxation, licensing, or other means, the activities of nonmembers who enter consensual relationships with the tribe or its members, through commercial dealing, contracts, leases, or other arrangements." 450 U. S., at 565.

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