Louisiana v. Mississippi
Opinion of the Court
Motion for leave to file bill of complaint denied. [For earlier order herein, see ante, p. 808.]
Dissenting Opinion
with whom
Louisiana’s complaint against Mississippi is plainly within our original jurisdiction and alleges a boundary dispute with Mississippi, the very kind of a dispute that countless times the Court has accepted and adjudicated under its original jurisdiction. Furthermore, as 28 U. S. C. § 1251(a) prescribes, the Court has exclusive jurisdiction over controversies between States. No other court may entertain Louisiana’s complaint against Mississippi.
It is true that Louisiana intervened in a dispute between private parties over the ownership of land on an island in the Mississippi River, claiming that the land was in’ that State. That suit might settle the dispute among the parties and the State, but a judgment that the island is in Louisiana,would not bind Mississippi. For that reason, I suppose, Louisiana filed a third-party complaint against Mississippi and also sought leave to file an original action in this Court. We prefer to have disputes within our original jurisdiction settled in other fora where possible. See, e. g., Arizona v. New Mexico, 425 U. S. 794 (1976). But this boundary dispute between two States is exclusively our business and, as
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