Cite as: 521 U. S. 1 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
cuses principally on the United States' position in a series of disputes with States over ownership of submerged lands in the vicinity of near-fringing islands, rather than on positions taken in its international relations. First, in 1950, the State Department and the Justice Department proposed a boundary between Louisiana's inland and territorial waters for use in the Louisiana Boundary Case. That boundary, known as the Chapman Line, followed certain barrier islands along Louisiana's southeast coast, enclosing Chandeleur and Breton Sounds and Calliou Bay as inland waters. According to Alaska, the Chapman Line shows the use of a simple 10-mile rule. Second, in 1951, the Justice Department asked the State Department to outline the United States' approach to demarcating inland and territorial waters, for purposes of submerged lands litigation between the United States and California. A letter from the Acting Secretary of State stated that an island "was to be surrounded by its own belt of territorial waters measured in the same manner as in the case of the mainland." Alaska Exh. 85-94 (Letter from James E. Webb to J. Howard McGrath, Attorney General, Nov. 13, 1951, p. 3). The letter also drew upon the 1930 Hague proposals for straits, noting that the waters of a strait connecting high seas were never inland waters, but that bay-closing rules should apply to a strait serving as "a channel of communication to an inland sea." Id., at 4. Third, in a submission to the Court in 1958, the United States commented that waters behind certain islands in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were inland waters. Brief for United States in Support of Motion for Judgment on Amended Complaint in United States v. Louisiana, O. T. 1958, No. 9 Orig., pp. 177, 254, 261.
We agree with the Special Master that the United States did not exclusively employ a simple 10-mile rule in its disputes with the Gulf States and with California. The 1951 State Department letter in the California litigation merely echoed the United States' proposal at the Hague Conference
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