Cite as: 526 U. S. 473 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
litigating a Price-Anderson claim on the merits and for determining whether a claim falls under Price-Anderson when removal is contested.
Petitioners seek the benefit of what in effect is the same scheme of preference for a federal forum when they ask for an injunction against further litigation in the tribal courts. To be sure, their complaints claimed that the tribal courts (unlike state courts) had no jurisdiction over these actions, on the ground that they were Price-Anderson claims. But petitioners unmistakably seek to enjoin litigation of these claims in the tribal courts, whether or not those courts would have jurisdiction to exercise in the absence of objection. Injunction against further litigation in tribal courts would in practical terms give the same result as a removal held to be justified on the ground that the actions removed fell under the Price-Anderson definitions of claims of public liability: if respondents then should wish to proceed they would be forced to refile their claims in federal court (or a state court from which the claims would be removed). The issue, then, is whether Congress would have chosen to postpone federal resolution of the enjoinable character of this tribal-court litigation, when it would not have postponed federal resolution of the functionally identical issue pending in a state court.
We are at a loss to think of any reason that Congress would have favored tribal exhaustion. Any generalized sense of comity toward nonfederal courts is obviously displaced by the provisions for preemption and removal from state courts, which are thus accorded neither jot nor tittle of deference.7 The apparent reasons for this congressional
7 This is not to say that the existence of a federal preemption defense in the more usual sense would affect the logic of tribal exhaustion. Under normal circumstances, tribal courts, like state courts, can and do decide questions of federal law, and there is no reason to think that questions of federal preemption are any different. See Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U. S. 49, 65 (1978) (tribal courts available to vindicate federal rights). The situation here is the rare one in which statutory provisions
485
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