720
Opinion of Souter, J.
requiring disgorgement to the Crow Tribe of all Montana taxes collected from Westmoreland based on coal mined from the ceded strip between 1976 and 1982. As the Court explains, ante, at 715, Cotton Petroleum makes clear that the taxes were objectionable not because the State was wholly disentitled to tax the Tribe's coal operation, but because the " 'extraordinarily high' " taxes affecting the marketability of the Tribe's coal were simply excessive. 490 U. S., at 186- 187, n. 17. Since Montana was free to levy and collect the portion of taxes below the threshold of excessiveness, I concur in the Court's decision to reverse the judgment and remand for further proceedings.
If the Court stopped there, the Court of Appeals would be free to set the stage for the District Court to engage in serious weighing of a claim to partial disgorgement under the Tribe's complaint, which, as now amended, seeks disgorgement of all moneys "illegally collected." * Although this request for relief was originally predicated on a reading of Crow II that Cotton Petroleum shows was too expansive, the Tribe's prayer naturally encompasses the lesser claim to disgorgement of any taxes in excess of the State's limit.
It would be open to the Court of Appeals, further, to indicate that nothing done either by the Department of the Interior or by the Tribe raised a dispositive bar to the Tribe's claim to pre-1983 revenues, contrary to what the District Court had suggested, App. to Pet. for Cert. 35-37, leaving that latter court free to determine what had been excessive and to reweigh the equities. After considering what the Tribe had already received, among the other relevant facts, the District Court might require disgorgement of all, some, or none of the excessive taxes for the period before 1983.
The Court impedes any such exercise of trial court discretion, however, if it does not entirely foreclose it. Although the Court says that it does not "foreclose the District Court
*In December 1990, the United States, as trustee for the Tribe, filed its own amended complaint seeking essentially the same relief.
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