Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-454_4g15.pdf
Page Number: 79.0

12 

SACKETT v. EPA 

KAVANAUGH, J., concurring in judgment 

text of the statute, as well as 45 years of consistent agency 
practice and this Court’s precedents, I respectfully disagree 
with the Court’s decision to interpret “waters of the United
States” to include only adjoining wetlands and not adjacent
wetlands. 

IV 

The difference between “adjacent” and “adjoining” in this 
context  is  not  merely  semantic  or  academic.    The  Court’s 
rewriting  of  “adjacent”  to  mean  “adjoining”  will  matter  a 
great deal in the real world.  In particular, the Court’s new
and overly narrow test may leave long-regulated and long-
accepted-to-be-regulable  wetlands  suddenly  beyond  the
scope  of  the  agencies’  regulatory  authority,  with  negative 
consequences for waters of the United States.  For example,
the Mississippi River features an extensive levee system to
prevent  flooding.  Under  the  Court’s  “continuous  surface 
levees  (the 
connection”  test,  the  presence  of  those 
equivalent  of  a  dike)  would  seemingly  preclude  Clean 
Water Act coverage of adjacent wetlands on the other side 
of the levees, even though the adjacent wetlands are often 
an important part of the flood-control project.  See Brief for 
Respondents  30.  Likewise,  federal  protection  of  the 
Chesapeake Bay might be less effective if fill can be dumped 
into  wetlands  that  are  adjacent  to  (but  not  adjoining)  the
bay and its covered tributaries.  See id., at 35.  Those are 
just two of many examples of how the Court’s overly narrow 
view of the Clean Water Act will have concrete impact. 

As  those  examples  reveal,  there  is  a  good  reason  why
Congress  covered  not  only  adjoining  wetlands  but  also 
adjacent  wetlands.  Because  of  the  movement  of  water 
between adjacent wetlands and other waters, pollutants in 
wetlands often end up in adjacent rivers, lakes, and other 
waters.  Natural barriers such as berms and dunes do not 
block  all  water  flow  and  are  in  fact  evidence  of  a  regular 
connection between a water and  a wetland.   85 Fed. Reg.