Cite as: 526 U. S. 473 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
at 857, whereas a state court's determination of its jurisdiction is final except for the possibility of our review on certiorari. But the likelihood of effective review says nothing to the Act's insistence on efficient disposition of public liability claims, which would of course be curtailed by an exhaustion requirement. It is not credible that Congress would have uniquely countenanced, let alone chosen, such a delay when public liability claims are brought in tribal court.
The second possible justification is that the absence of any statutory provision for removal from tribal court running parallel to the terms authorizing state-court removal might ground a negative inference against any intent to govern Price-Anderson actions in tribal courts, in accordance with the usual policy of letting a plaintiff choose the forum. But only the most zealous application of the maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius could answer the implausibility that Congress would have intended to force defendants to remain in tribal courts. The congressional reasoning sketched above is no less forceful when plaintiffs choose tribal courts; leaving such claims in these courts would just as effectively thwart the Act's policy of getting such cases into a federal forum for consolidation, as leaving them in state forums would do.
Why, then, the congressional silence on tribal courts? If "expressio unius . . ." fails to explain the Congress's failure to provide for tribal-court removal, what is the explanation? After all we have said, inadvertence seems the most likely. We have not been told of any nuclear testing laboratories or reactors on reservation lands, and if none was brought to the attention of Congress either, Congress probably would never have expected an occasion for asserting tribal jurisdiction over claims like these. Now and then silence is not pregnant.
Because the comity rationale for tribal exhaustion normally appropriate to a tribal court's determination of its jurisdiction stops short of the Price-Anderson Act, the District
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