OCR Text |
Show -91- because he came from Connecticut! casts an odd light on more recent days when, perhaps conscious that the old bitternesses were fainter, and that only the western judges could cope with the terminology of a specialized subject, Justice Brewer of Kansas actually wrote the opinion against his own state in one great irrigation case, and Justice Van Devanter of Wyo- ming wrote that in favor of his own state in another. Justice Brewers attitude seems particularly bold and admirablet (There is a sidelight on this in Madison*s Journal of the Convention on August 2lj, 1787)• To date, the Supreme Court has passed upon forty-seven controversies with states on both sides of the conflict. The United States intervened in three of these. This total does not, of course, include suits between states and individuals on the other- side, which are, of course, of common occurrence and the ordinary situation in criminal law, nor does it in- clude suits in which the United States has sued states or individuals or vice versa. We are concerned only with instances in which one state has invoked the original trial jurisdiction of the great court in a direct conflict with another. Of these forty-seven suits, some of which appear many times in vari- ous stages in the reports, thirty-four were bound-ry disputes or involved money claims. The principles applicable in such cases were easily borrow- ed from legal traditions and the opinions are usually not startling. One or two* like the bitter oyster war between Louisiana and Mississippi (202 U» S. l), which threatened to revert to armed conflict^ and case of the refusal of West Virginia to pav its share of the Virginia debt (206 U»S.29O to fdk6 Ut S. 565), which embarrassed the court for a generaticn are political landmarks. Indeed, Virginia and Vest Virginia are incorrigible litigants, the former having been twelve times plaintiff and once defendant, and the latter a defendant only, but in fourteen oases* From the remaining thirteen cases between states which involved more than,pecuniary settlements or the location of border lines, we must gather whatever principles of justice govern the vaguer relations of our common- wealth. Of these cases* one involved the obligation to grant extraditions, one a question of a congressional land grant, one a complaint against the* extreme quarantine regulations of a neighboring state (which question es- caped decision on the point of who was really the person affected), and two very recent cases prohibit a state from withdrawing its natural gas from interstate commerce. These cases are mostly interpretation of written law. The remaining eight involve interstate waters. South Carolina vs» Georgia (93 U. S. hi 1876) was a complaint by the plaintiff that the defendant state had obstructed navigation on the Savannah River by permit- ting a dam to be built within her own borders. The Supreme Court found against the complainant on the facts. Missouri vs. Illinois (180 U. S» 208; 200 Ut' S. k%> 1902, 1907) concerned the claim that Chicago was en- dangering life on the Mississippi by dumping its s-swage therein through the drainage canal, and New York vs. New Jersey (2^9 ^ S» 202s 256 U. S« 2965 1908, 1919) was a similar complaint that New Jersey was poisoning New York Harbor by a sewage enterprise. The Supreme Court, with the utmost |