Opinion ID: 600290
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Subsequent Navigability or Tides

Text: 35 The State also assigns for review the question whether waters which are today saline, subject to ebb and flow of the tide, and de facto used in commercial navigation are State owned. The State brief suggests only that navigable water bodies are now considered public things under the 1978 revisions of the Civil Code and that the State owns lands influenced by the tides to today's high water mark under Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Mississippi, 484 U.S. 469, 108 S.Ct. 791, 98 L.Ed.2d 877. Questions posed for appellate review but inadequately briefed are considered abandoned. See Friou v. Phillips Petroleum Co., 948 F.2d 972, 974 (5th Cir.1991); Harris v. Plastics Mfg. Co., 617 F.2d 438, 440 (5th Cir.1980). 36 We note, nevertheless, that the district court properly focussed its inquiry regarding ownership and riparian rights upon the status of the waterways in 1812. E.g., Ramsey River, 396 So.2d at 875 ([N]avigability to fix ownership of the river bed is determined by the year of admission to statehood.); State v. Jefferson Island Salt Mining Co., 183 La. 304, 163 So. 145, 153 (1935) (navigability and high water mark of 1812 determine title questions), cert. denied, 297 U.S. 716, 56 S.Ct. 591, 80 L.Ed. 1001 (1936). As for the effect of the tide today, sympathetic tidal influence in inland waterways does not make the waterways sea or their banks seashore. See Buras, 97 So. at 750; Morgan, 3 So. at 639. Under the court's findings, the land is still not sea bottom or seashore, and so cannot become public property as such.