Arizona v. California, 530 U.S. 392, 17 (2000)

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408

ARIZONA v. CALIFORNIA

Opinion of the Court

stance bars the application of the doctrine of res judicata to this issue." Id., at 7.

While the Special Master correctly recognized the relevance of the Margold Opinion to the litigating stance of the United States, he ultimately relied on an improper ground in rejecting the State parties' preclusion argument. The Department of the Interior's 1978 Secretarial Order recognizing the Tribe's beneficial ownership of the boundary lands, see supra, at 404-405, does not qualify as a "later and then unknown circumstance" that can overcome otherwise applicable preclusion principles. The 1978 Order did not change the underlying facts in dispute; it simply embodied one party's changed view of the import of unchanged facts. Moreover, the Tribe can hardly claim to have been surprised by the Government's shift in assessment of the boundary lands ownership question, for the Tribe had been advocating just such a shift for decades.

The United States and the Tribe, however, urge other grounds on which to reject the State parties' argument regarding the preclusive effect of Arizona I. The United States and the Tribe maintain that the preclusion rationale the Court applied to the "omitted lands" in Arizona II is not equally applicable to the disputed boundary lands,2 and that, in any event, the State parties have forfeited their preclusion defense. We agree that the State parties' preclusion de-2 The United States and the Tribe point to the holding in Arizona I that Special Master Rifkind had erred in prematurely considering boundary lands claims relating to the Fort Mojave and Colorado River Reservations, see 373 U. S., at 601; they contend that consideration of the Fort Yuma Reservation boundaries would have been equally premature. They further stress that in Arizona II we held the omitted lands claims precluded because we resisted "reopen[ing] an adjudication . . . to reconsider whether initial factual determinations were correctly made," 460 U. S., at 623-624; in contrast, they maintain, the present claims turn on the validity of the 1893 Agreement and the 1978 Secretarial Order, questions of law not addressed in prior proceedings.

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