290
Opinion of the Court
1934 and Rule 10b-5 of the Securities [and] Exchange Commission," Pet. for Cert. i. 506 U. S. 814 (1992).
II
Requests to recognize a right to contribution for defendants liable under federal law are not unfamiliar to this Court. Twice we have declined to recognize an action for contribution under federal laws outside the arena of securities regulation. In Northwest Airlines, Inc. v. Transport Workers, 451 U. S. 77 (1981), we held that an employer had no right to contribution against unions alleged to be joint participants with the employer in violations of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later that same Term, in Texas Industries, Inc. v. Radcliff Materials, Inc., 451 U. S. 630 (1981), we determined that there is no right to contribution for recovery based on violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act.
On the other hand, we endorsed a nonstatutory right to contribution among joint tortfeasors responsible for injuring a longshoreman in Cooper Stevedoring Co. v. Fritz Kopke, Inc., 417 U. S. 106 (1974). We have been careful to note that Cooper does not stand for the proposition that there is a general right to contribution under federal law. Northwest Airlines, supra, at 96-97. Indeed, the rule announced in Cooper represented an exercise of our authority to provide just and equitable remedies for cases within our admiralty jurisdiction, a jurisdiction in which the federal courts have had historic, well-recognized responsibility for the elaboration of legal doctrine. See United States v. Reliable Transfer Co., 421 U. S. 397, 409 (1975). For our purposes, therefore, Cooper is less instructive than our decisions in Texas Industries and Northwest Airlines. But the instruction we receive from the latter two cases is that they are distinguishable from, rather than parallel to, the matter now before us.
The federal interests in both Texas Industries and Northwest Airlines were defined by statutory provisions that were
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