Court Opinion

ID: 9420035
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:40.5297+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:21.943925
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting.
By this original bill the United States prayed for a decree enjoining all persons, including those asserting a claim derived from the State of California, from trespassing upon the disputed area. An injunction against trespassers normally presupposes property rights. The Court, however, grants the prayer but does not do so by finding that the United States has proprietary interests in the area. To be sure, it denies such proprietary rights in California. But even if we assume an absence of ownership or possessory interest on the part of California, that does not establish a proprietary interest in the United States. It is significant that the Court does not adopt the Government’s elaborate argument, based on dubious and tenuous writings of publicists, see Schwarzenberger, Inductive Approach to International Law, 60 Harv. L. Rev. 539, 559, that this part of the open sea belongs, in a proprietary sense, to the United States. See American Banana Co. v. United Fruit Co., 213 U. S. 347, 351. Instead, the Court finds trespass against the United States on the basis of what it calls the “national dominion” by the United States over this area.
To speak of “dominion” carries precisely those overtones in the law which relate to property and not to political authority. Dominion, from the Roman concept dominium, was concerned with property and ownership, *44as against imperium, which related to political sovereignty. One may choose to say, for example, that the United States has “national dominion” over navigable streams. But the power to regulate commerce over these streams, and its continued exercise, do not change the imperium of the United States into dominium over the land below the waters. Of course the United States has “paramount rights” in the sea belt of California— the rights that are implied by the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, the power of condemnation, the treaty-making power, the war power. We have not now before us the validity of the exercise of any of these paramount rights. Rights of ownership are here asserted — and rights of ownership are something else. Ownership implies acquisition in the various ways in which land is acquired — by conquest, by discovery and claim, by cession, by prescription, by purchase, by condemnation. When and how did the United States acquire this land?
The fact that these oil deposits in the open sea may be vital to the national security, and important elements in the conduct of our foreign affairs, is no more relevant than is the existence of uranium deposits, wherever they may be, in determining questions of trespass to the land of which they form a part. This is not a situation where an exercise of national power is actively and presently interfered with. In such a case, the inherent power of a federal court of equity may be invoked to prevent or remove the obstruction. In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564; Sanitary District v. United States, 266 U. S. 405. Neither the bill, nor the opinion sustaining it, suggests that there is interference by California or the alleged trespassers with any authority which the Government presently seeks to exercise. It is beside the point to say that “if wars come, they must be fought by the nation.” Nor is it relevant that “The very oil about which the state and nation here *45contend might well become the subject of international dispute and settlement.” It is common knowledge that uranium has become “the subject of international dispute” with a view to settlement. Compare Missouri v. Holland, 252 U. S. 416.
To declare that the Government has “national dominion” is merely a way of saying that vis-a-vis all other nations the Government is the sovereign. If that is what the Court’s decree means, it needs no pronouncement by this Court to confer or declare such sovereignty. If it means more than that, it implies that the Government has some proprietary interest. That has not been remotely established except by sliding from absence of ownership by California to ownership by the United States.
Let us assume, for the present, that ownership by California cannot be proven. On a fair analysis of all the evidence bearing on ownership, then, this area is, I believe, to be deemed unclaimed land, and the determination to claim it on the part of the United States is a political decision not for this Court. The Constitution places vast authority for the conduct of foreign relations in the independent hands of the President. See United States v. Curtiss-Wright Corp., 299 U. S. 304. It is noteworthy that the Court does not treat the President’s proclamation in regard to the disputed area as an assertion of ownership. See Exec. Proc. 2667 (Sept. 28,1945) 10 F. R. 12303. If California is found to have no title, and this area is regarded as unclaimed land, I have no doubt that the President and the Congress between them could make it part of the national domain and thereby bring it under Article IV, Section 3, of the Constitution. The disposition of the area, the rights to be created in it, the rights heretofore claimed in it through usage that might be respected though it fall short of prescription, all raise appropriate questions of policy, questions of ac*46commodation, for the determination of which Congress and not this Court is the appropriate agency.
Today this Court has decided that a new application even in the old field of torts should not be made by adjudication, where Congress has refrained from acting. United States v. Standard Oil Co., 332 U. S. 301. Considerations of judicial self-restraint would seem to me far more compelling where there are obviously at stake claims that involve so many far-reaching, complicated, historic interests, the proper adjustments of which are not readily resolved by the materials and methods to which this Court is confined.
This is a summary statement of views which it would serve no purpose to elaborate. I think that the bill should be dismissed without prejudice.