Cite as: 533 U. S. 353 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
Constitution, which leaves to Congress the decision whether to create lower federal courts at all. This historical and constitutional assumption of concurrent state-court jurisdiction over federal-law cases is completely missing with respect to tribal courts.
Respondents' contention that tribal courts are courts of "general jurisdiction" is also quite wrong. A state court's jurisdiction is general, in that it "lays hold of all subjects of litigation between parties within its jurisdiction, though the causes of dispute are relative to the laws of the most distant part of the globe." Id., at 493. Tribal courts, it should be clear, cannot be courts of general jurisdiction in this sense, for a tribe's inherent adjudicative jurisdiction over nonmembers is at most only as broad as its legislative jurisdiction. See supra, at 357-359.8 It is true that some statutes proclaim tribal-court jurisdiction over certain questions of federal law. See, e. g., 25 U. S. C. § 1911(a) (authority to adjudicate child custody disputes under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978); 12 U. S. C. § 1715z-13(g)(5) ( jurisdiction over mortgage foreclosure actions brought by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development against reserva-8 Justice Stevens argues that "[a]bsent federal law to the contrary, the question whether tribal courts are courts of general jurisdiction is fundamentally one of tribal law." Post, at 402 (emphasis deleted). The point of our earlier discussion is that Strate is "federal law to the contrary." Justice Stevens thinks Strate cannot fill that role, because it "merely concerned the circumstances under which tribal courts can exert jurisdiction over claims against nonmembers," post, at 403, n. 3. But Strate's limitation on jurisdiction over nonmembers pertains to subject-matter, rather than merely personal, jurisdiction, since it turns upon whether the actions at issue in the litigation are regulable by the tribe. One can of course say that even courts of limited subject-matter jurisdiction have general jurisdiction over those subjects that they can adjudicate (in the present case, jurisdiction over claims pertaining to activities by nonmembers that can be regulated)—but that makes the concept of general jurisdiction meaningless, and is assuredly not the criterion that would determine whether these courts received authority to adjudicate § 1983 actions.
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