Cite as: 533 U. S. 353 (2001)
Souter, J., concurring
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case remanded for further proceedings consistent with our opinion.
It is so ordered.
Justice Souter, with whom Justice Kennedy and Justice Thomas join, concurring.
I agree that the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribal Court had no jurisdiction to entertain Hicks's claims against the petitioning state officers here, and I join the Court's opinion. While I agree with the Court's analysis as well as its conclusion, I would reach that point by a different route. Like the Court, I take Montana v. United States, 450 U. S. 544 (1981), to be the source of the first principle on tribal-court civil jurisdiction, see Atkinson Trading Co. v. Shirley, 532 U. S. 645, 659 (2001) (Souter, J., concurring). But while the Court gives emphasis to measuring tribal authority here in light of the State's interest in executing its own legal process to enforce state law governing off-reservation conduct, ante, at 360-365, I would go right to Montana's rule that a tribe's civil jurisdiction generally stops short of non-member defendants, 450 U. S., at 565, subject only to two exceptions, one turning on "consensual relationships," the other on respect for "the political integrity, the economic security, or the health or welfare of the tribe," id., at 566.1
Montana applied this presumption against tribal jurisdiction to nonmember conduct on fee land within a reservation; I would also apply it where, as here, a nonmember acts on tribal or trust land, and I would thus make it explicit that land status within a reservation is not a primary juris-1 The virtue of the Court's approach is in laying down a rule that would be unquestionably applicable even if in a future case the state officials issuing and executing state process happened to be tribal members (which they apparently are not here).
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