Page:Arizona v. Navajo Nation.pdf/43

22 States, or Executive orders of the President.” Ibid. Notably, however, the Tucker Acts provide only a selective waiver of sovereign immunity, not a cause of action. To determine whether a Tribe can seek money damages on any given claim, this Court has laid out a two-part test. First, a court must ascertain whether there exists “specific rights-creating or duty-imposing statutory or regulatory prescriptions,” Navajo I, 537 U. S., at 506, producing a scheme that bears the “hallmarks of a more conventional fiduciary relationship,” United States v. White Mountain Apache Tribe, 537 U. S. 465, 473 (2003). Second, once a Tribe has identified such a provision, the court must use “trust principles” to assess whether (and in what amount) the United States owes damages. United States v. Navajo Nation, 556 U. S. 287, 301 (2009) (Navajo II).

To describe this regime is to explain why the Court errs in relying on it. The Navajo do not bring a claim for money damages in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Acts (thereby implicating those Acts’ selective waiver of sovereign immunity). Rather, the Navajo seek equitable relief in federal district court on a treaty claim governed by the familiar principles recounted above. See. They do so with the help of 28 U. S. C. §1362, a provision enacted after the Tucker Acts that gives federal district courts “original jurisdiction” over “civil actions” brought by Tribes “under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.” Ibid.; see also Brief for Historians as Amici Curiae 31. As this Court has noted, §1362 serves “to open the federal courts to the kind of claims that could have been brought by the United States as trustee, but for whatever reason were not so brought.” Moe, 425 U. S., at 472. That perfectly summarizes the claim that the Navajo advance here—a treaty-based claim bottomed on Winters that all agree the United States could bring in its capacity as a trustee. Nor does anyone question that the United States has waived sovereign immunity for claims “seeking relief other