Opinion ID: 107545
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the use of present boundaries.

Text: As the earlier opinion explained, the congressional assumption that some States have existing historic boundaries was based on the history of this Court's treatment of submerged lands. [8] The Court had early held that the States owned the land beneath their inland navigable waters. Pollard's Lessee v. Hagan, 3 How. 212. Following that case it was widely believed that the same rule would apply to the marginal sea, that is, that the States owned the land beneath the waters of the sea within their boundaries. [9] This belief was based on two assumptions neither of which was authoritatively tested until the 1940's: first, that at least some States had valid boundaries in the sea, and second, that the States owned submerged land within them. In a series of cases beginning in 1947, the second assumption was destroyed by this Court: the United States was held to have paramount rights in offshore lands as an attribute of national sovereignty. [10] The first assumption, however, was explicitly left standing by those decisions: . . . The question here is not the power of a State to use the marginal sea or to regulate its use in absence of a conflicting federal policy . . . . ..... . . . We intimate no opinion on the power of a State to extend, define, or establish its external territorial limits or on the consequences of any such extension vis ā vis persons other than the United States . . . . The matter of State boundaries has no bearing on the present problem.  [11] (Emphasis added.) As we held in the earlier phase of the present case, Congress' purpose in the Submerged Lands Act was to restore the situation to what it had assumed it to be prior to 1947, and its method of doing this was to quit-claim back to the States the paramount rights that this Court had found to be an attribute of national sovereignty. [12] This quitclaim, like the cases that led to it, had nothing to do with the validity or location of state maritime boundaries. As Senator Cordon, the Acting Chairman of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and the bill's chief exponent in the Senate, put the matter, The States of the United States have legal boundaries. It is not a part of the power or the duty of Congress to make determination with reference to those boundaries, or where those boundaries should lie. It is a matter for the courts to determine, or for the United States . . . and . . . the several States, to reach an agreement upon. The pending bill does not seek to invade either province . . . . Whenever a question arises as to a boundary, it will be determined exactly as any other question in law is determined, and the boundary will be established. . . . It is not within the province of Congress to change the present boundaries of Texas without the consent of the State of Texas. 99 Cong. Rec. 2620. (Emphasis added.) In the Court's prior opinion in this litigation we expressly adopted this construction of the Act. We accepted the then contention of the United States that the Act did not purport to determine, fix, or change the boundary of any State, but left it to the courts to ascertain whether a particular State had a seaward boundary. [13] We went on to say, [W]e find a clear understanding by Congress that the question of rights beyond three miles turned on the existence of an expressly defined state boundary beyond three miles. Congress was aware that several States claimed such a boundary. Texas throughout repeatedly asserted its claim that when an independent republic its statutes established a three-league maritime boundary, and that the United States ratified that boundary when Texas was admitted to the Union . . . . It was recognized [by Congress] that if the legal existence of such boundaries could be established, they would clearly entitle the respective States to submerged land rights to that distance under an application of the Pollard rule to the marginal sea. Hence . . . the right of the Gulf States to prove boundaries in excess of three miles was preserved. [14]