Cite as: 508 U. S. 200 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
not apply when there is no "settled judicial construction" at the time of reenactment). The decision in British American Tobacco strikes us, moreover, as a sensible reading of the statute, for it honors Congress's decision to limit Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction not only as to claims "for . . . which" the plaintiff has sued in another court, but as to those "in respect to which" he has sued elsewhere as well. While the latter language does not set the limits of claim identity with any precision, it does make it clear that Congress did not intend the statute to be rendered useless by a narrow concept of identity providing a correspondingly liberal opportunity to maintain two suits arising from the same factual foundation.
Keene nonetheless argues, for the first time in its merits brief,7 that "[a] claim brought outside the [Court of Federal Claims] is 'for or in respect to' a claim in the [Court of Federal Claims only] when claim-splitting law would treat them as the same—i. e., require them to be joined in a single suit—if the two claims were both brought against the United States." Brief for Petitioner 20. Under this theory, § 1500 would not apply to a Court of Federal Claims plaintiff unless his suit pending in the other court rested on a legal theory that could have been pleaded (as Keene's could not have been) in the Court of Federal Claims. But this reinterpretation of § 1500 is bound to fail, not because novelty is always fatal in the construction of an old statute, but because the novel proposition in Keene's suggested reading would have rendered the statute useless, in all or nearly all instances, to effect the very object it was originally en-7 Keene argued in its petition for certiorari that the claim it raised in its third-party action in Miller was not based on the same facts as its complaint in Keene I. Keene did not press this argument after we granted the writ, and, in any event, we see no reason to disturb the rulings to the contrary by both courts below. See 962 F. 2d, at 1024 ("[W]e have no quarrel with the [Court of Federal Claims] determination that the underlying facts in Miller and Keene I are the same").
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