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Show -U+-. are justiciable by their voluntary consent as expressed in the federal consti- tution. 31 . . It may be well now to examine with more particularity some of the above mentioned provisions of the constitution of the United States in virtue of which sovereign rights in American waters differ from corresponding sovereign rights elsewhere in the family of nations to which each of the original thirteen American States separately belonged before the formation of their "more perfect Union." Sovereign rights, being political and supreme, are restrained only by inter- national law or by voluntary agreementt The status of sovereign rights is, therefore, to be ascertained primarily from diplomatic documents and state papers, where international lav; and sovereign agreements find expression, and not from the decisions of courts, whose power is derived from sovereignty and cannot rise above itt32 General treaties and conventions are the statutes of international law; and the usages, customs and common policies of the nations in dealing with each other are the unwritten law of the international realm. The legislators for the States of the American Union in the council of world law are the President and the Senate of the United States. The President also directs the diplomacy and, with the Senate, formulates the foreign policy through which the assent of the States in union to the unwritten law of nations is implied within the limits of use made or proposed by these sovereign agents under authority of the federal constitution. International law, so made, applies not merely to the federal sovereignty but alsocto the States as though, disunited. ¦ For the States, having remained sovereign, except as otherwise provided in their articles of union, and having retained the power to recall any and every part of the federal sovereignty, delegated by them, cannot, in the event of such recall or the dissolution of the Union,33 repudiate the acts of their international legislators and representatives done under a written constitution expressly 31 In Rhode Island v. Massachusetts, 12 Pet. (U.S.) 657, 720, 9 L. Ed. 1233, I259 (I836), the United States Supreme Court in holding that it had jursi- diction to determine a boundary dispute between two States saidj "Those States, in their highest sovereign capacity, in the convention of the people thereof j on whom, by the Revolution, the prerogative of the crown, and the transcendent power of parliament devolved, in a plenitude unimpaired by any act, and control- lable by ao authority, 6 "Wheat. ((U.S.)) 65I; 8 Wheat ((U.S.) 5kl), 5$k» 5^8, 5 1*. Ed, 681, 691, 692), adopted the constitution, by which they respectively made to the United States a grant of judicial power over controversies between two or'more states. • • ¦ The States waived their exemption from judicial power, 6 Wheat. ((U.S.) 261+), 378, 38O, (5 L. Ed. 257, 28^), as sovereigns by original a.nd inherent right, by their own grant of its exercise over themselves in such ca.ses, . . • and though the constitution does not, in terms, extend the judicial power to all controversies between two or more States, yet it in terms excludes none, whatever may be their nature or subject." See also, Scott, Sovereign States and Suits, 121-15Q. 52In Klawananakoa v. Polybank, 205 U.S. 3^9, 353, 27 Sup. Ct. 526, 527, 51 L. Ed. 83I4., 836 (1907), the Court, speaking through Mr. Justice Holmes, said: "A sovereign is exempt from suit, not because of any formal conception or obsolete theory, but on the logical and practical ground that there can be no legal righ/t as against the authority that makes the law on which the right depends." |