Transcript:
Argument of Speaker
Mr. Speaker: The opinion of the Court in No. 08 Orig. Arizona v. California will be announced by Justice Ginsburg.
Argument of Justice Ginsburg
Mr. Ginsburg: This original action, now nearly a half-century old, concerns rights to water from the Colorado River system.
We have already issued two opinions in this case; one in 1963 and the second in 1983.
In this third installment of the litigation, the Quechan Tribe and the United States on the Tribe’s behalf, claimed rights to additional water for the Quechan Tribes Reservation.
The States of Arizona and California together with two municipal water districts urged an opposition that these additional water rights claims are made too late.
Specifically, they urged that the further adjudication sought by the United States and the Tribe is foreclosed either by this Court’s 1963 decision in this case or by a consent judgment entered in 1983 by the United States Claims Court in an action brought by the Tribe against United States.
The Special Master recommended that we reject the first ground for refusing to consider the Tribe’s eligibility for additional river water, but accept the second.
We reject both grounds for precluding further proceedings.
First, we need not decide whether our 1963 decision would bar the present claims, but we hold that the state parties have forfeited their preclusion defense by failing to raise it earlier in the litigation despite ample opportunity and cause to do so.
We next consider and reject the Special Master’s conclusion that the 1983 Claims Court consent judgment, extinguished the Tribe’s claim to title in the disputed lands.
As between the Tribe and the United States, the consent judgment did indeed preclude litigation of all claims and defenses that had been or could have been brought.
But consent judgments do not involve the actual litigation and judicial determination of specific issues.
Therefore consent judgments ordinarily do not preclude the litigation of such issues in discreet actions against third parties.
That is particularly true, where as in this case, the consent judgment is ambiguous as between mutually exclusive theories of recovery.
Finally, we accept the Master’s recommendation concerning water rights claims for two other Indian Reservations and approve the party’s proposed settlements with respect to those reservations.
The Chief Justice has filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, joined by Justice O’Connor and Justice Thomas.
