760
Stevens, J., dissenting
In light of these concerns, we decline to revisit our case law and choose to defer to Congress. Tribes enjoy immunity from suits on contracts, whether those contracts involve governmental or commercial activities and whether they were made on or off a reservation. Congress has not abrogated this immunity, nor has petitioner waived it, so the immunity governs this case. The contrary decision of the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals is
Reversed.
Justice Stevens, with whom Justice Thomas and Justice Ginsburg join, dissenting.
"Absent express federal law to the contrary, Indians going beyond reservation boundaries have generally been held subject to nondiscriminatory state law otherwise applicable to all citizens of the State." Mescalero Apache Tribe v. Jones, 411 U. S. 145, 148-149 (1973). There is no federal statute or treaty that provides petitioner, the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, any immunity from the application of Oklahoma law to its off-reservation commercial activities. Nor, in my opinion, should this Court extend the judge-made doctrine of sovereign immunity to pre-empt the authority of the state courts to decide for themselves whether to accord such immunity to Indian tribes as a matter of comity.
I
"The doctrine of sovereign immunity is an amalgam of two quite different concepts, one applicable to suits in the sovereign's own courts and the other to suits in the courts of another sovereign." Nevada v. Hall, 440 U. S. 410, 414 (1979). In the former category, the sovereign's power to determine the jurisdiction of its own courts and to define the substantive legal rights of its citizens adequately explains the lesser authority to define its own immunity. Kawananakoa v. Polyblank, 205 U. S. 349, 353 (1907). The sovereign's claim to immunity in the courts of a second sovereign,
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