Cite as: 523 U. S. 767 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
ous one, that in 1834 everybody knew what Ellis Island was. The drafters' silence, then, can hardly be taken to convert the Island's name into a definitional Proteus for validating sovereignty claims.
Nor can we draw any conclusion in New York's favor from the failure of the Compact to address the consequences of landfilling, however common the practice may have been.5 There would have been no reason to do so, simply for the reason that the legal consequences were sufficiently clear under the common law as it was understood in 1834.6 In
this case, as in Georgia v. South Carolina, 497 U. S. 376, 404 (1990), the expansion of the Island "was not caused by either of the adjoining States, but by the United States Army Corps of Engineers." Under the common law, a littoral owner, like the United States in the instant case, "cannot extend [its] own property into the water by landfilling or purposefully causing accretion." Ibid. (citing Seacoast Real Estate Co. v. American Timber Co., 92 N. J. Eq. 219, 221, 113 A. 489, 490 (1920)); see also United States v. California, 381 U. S. 139, 177 (1965) (referring to "the rule of property law
5 Beyond the language cited already, nothing else in the Compact governs the consequence of expanding the Island. The closest approach to the subject of avulsion comes in Article Third, which carves out an exception to New York's exclusive jurisdiction over all the waters of the New York Harbor by specifically providing that New Jersey shall have "exclusive jurisdiction of and over the wharves, docks, and improvements, made and to be made on the shore of the said state."
6 Although Justice Scalia, see post, at 831-832, seems to make some of the same mistakes in assessing the evidence that Justice Stevens makes, Justice Scalia applies his interpretation of the facts to the 1834 Compact, assuming that the agreement was ambiguous about which State would have sovereignty over any land added to the Island, and concluding that the parties' conduct in the years following the Compact indicates that the filled land belonged to New York. But this is to convert an agree-ment's utter silence on an issue into contractual ambiguity; no such translation is possible here, for the silence of the Compact was on the subject of settled law governing avulsion, which the parties' silence showed no intent to modify.
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