Alaska v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that Alaska does not own the submerged lands under isolated pockets of water in the Alexander Archipelago, because those waters are open sea rather than inland waters, and that the federal government kept ownership of the seabed beneath Glacier Bay because Congress clearly meant to hold onto land set aside as a wildlife refuge.
The decision resolves a long-running boundary dispute between Alaska and the United States by applying established rules about when new states automatically get title to underwater land and when the federal government can keep it instead.
“The test is what mariners see, not what litigators invent.”
Explaining why Alaska's claimed 'bays' failed because they were not visibly recognizable as bays to sailors.
How it got here: Alaska filed an original complaint directly with the Supreme Court; a Special Master heard the evidence and recommended summary judgment for the United States on all claims, and Alaska filed exceptions to that report.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Alaska sued the United States directly in the Supreme Court, as it's allowed to do for disputes between a state and the federal government, seeking ownership of underwater land in two places: scattered patches of water among the islands of the Alexander Archipelago in southeast Alaska, and the seabed beneath Glacier Bay, a large fjord now part of Glacier Bay National Park.
The question before the Court
Did Alaska own the seabed under scattered patches of water in the Alexander Archipelago and under Glacier Bay, or did the federal government keep title to those areas?
The Court's answer
Partly. The Court ruled that Alaska does not own the seabed under the isolated pockets of water in the Alexander Archipelago, because those waters were never treated as 'inland' under either the historic-waters or juridical-bay tests — they remain open sea, so the presumption of state ownership never arose there in the first place.
For Glacier Bay, the Court ruled the opposite way but for a different reason: the bay's waters clearly are inland, so Alaska started with a strong presumption of ownership. But the Court found that a provision of the Alaska Statehood Act, which withheld transfer of any lands set aside as wildlife refuges, was written broadly enough to cover Glacier Bay National Monument and thus overcame that presumption, letting the federal government keep the submerged land.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The ruling settles who controls valuable underwater real estate near a major national park and remote island waters — determining who can lease, regulate, or tax activity there. It also reinforces how narrowly written federal land-transfer statutes can preserve federal control over resource-rich areas even after a territory becomes a state.
What changes now
This is a final merits ruling resolving the boundary dispute; the Court directed the parties to work with the Special Master to draft a formal decree spelling out the boundary lines, and the Court retained jurisdiction to handle any further orders needed to carry out the decision. No further litigation on these specific tracts is expected once the decree is entered.
What this does not decide
The ruling is limited to the specific archipelago pockets and Glacier Bay; it does not decide ownership of other Alaska coastal waters, and the Court expressly avoided ruling on whether the Antiquities Act itself gives the President power to defeat state title, resting its Glacier Bay holding only on the Statehood Act's text.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent in part — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia agreed with everything except the Glacier Bay ruling. He argued the statutory proviso, by its own wording ('such transfer'), only carved out property already covered by the preceding clause about fish and wildlife equipment, and since Glacier Bay wasn't covered by that clause, the proviso never applied to it. He would have found the federal government's proof of clear intent to retain the bay's submerged lands far too weak to overcome Alaska's presumption of ownership.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- For the archipelago waters, the Court asked whether they qualify as 'historic inland waters' — a status requiring proof that the United States continuously asserted the power to exclude even ships on peaceful, harmless passage, with other countries going along with it. Reviewing 180 years of history, the Court found no consistent assertion of that exclusive power.
- The Court also rejected Alaska's fallback theory that the same waters were 'juridical bays' (indentations enclosed enough to count as inland water), because the claimed bays depended on treating four separate islands as if they formed one solid peninsula, and even then the resulting bodies of water lacked the clear, chart-visible boundaries a mariner would need to recognize a bay.
- For Glacier Bay, the Court applied its established two-step test for federal reservations: first, whether the government meant to include the submerged lands within the protected area at all, and second, whether the government clearly expressed an intent to keep federal title rather than let it pass to the new state.
- The Court found the first step easily satisfied, since the presidential proclamations creating and expanding the monument plainly covered the bay's waters and their submerged floor.
- On the second step, the Court read a proviso in the Alaska Statehood Act — which withheld from transfer any 'lands withdrawn or otherwise set apart as refuges or reservations for the protection of wildlife' — as a free-standing rule rather than one limited only to the property described in the sentence before it, so it applied to Glacier Bay even though Glacier Bay wasn't covered by that earlier sentence.
- Because the proviso plainly kept federal ownership of any wildlife reservation regardless of which law created it, and Glacier Bay National Monument was a wildlife reservation, the proviso defeated the presumption that Alaska automatically got title to the bay's submerged land at statehood.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Alaska (Arctic Coast) (521 U. S. 1)
The Court relied on and extended this earlier ruling's reading of the Statehood Act proviso to cover Glacier Bay as well.
Distinguishes United States v. Maine (469 U. S. 504)
The Court contrasted Alaska's unrecognized hypothetical bays with the clearly recognized sound at issue in that earlier case.