Cite as: 523 U. S. 767 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
right to any part of the Island or that New Jersey's officials must have known about the acts or the claim.
2
New York presented evidence of New York State and New York City statutes and ordinances that included the Island in voting districts, together with voting registration lists with names of people who indicated that they lived on filled portions of the Island. The limited force of this evidence is, however, manifest. The state statutes make no specific reference to the filled land, and even if they are read as doing so, they are evidence of claims made in Albany or Manhattan, not acts of sovereignty on the Island. Nor does the legislation reflect any awareness of changes in the Island's territory over time. The same New York statutes for the establishment of Senate and Assembly districts covering Ellis Island also purport to include another of the so-called Oyster Islands that had been dredged out of existence by 1903, see 1916 N. Y. Laws, ch. 373; 1917 N. Y. Laws, ch. 798; 1943 N. Y. Laws, ch. 359; in fact, the reference to the latter was not deleted from the New York statutes until 1953, see 1953 N. Y. Laws, ch. 893, and the related maps of the First and Second Assembly districts continued to show the missing Oyster Island as late as 1945. The depiction of Ellis Island on these maps remains constant even though throughout the first third of this century the Island continued to change size and shape. N. Y. Exhs. 957-963 (maps of Borough of Manhattan, 1st and 2d Assembly Dists., issued by Bd. of Elections of N. Y. C. (1918, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1930, 1939, 1945)). Since New York made no effort to update its description of voting districts to eliminate the reference to Oyster Island, never specifically indicated an intent to include the filled land in its voting districts, and failed to make any alteration in its representation of the Island on its voting maps, its legislative acts were not overtly prescriptive and furnished no reason for New Jersey to infer that New York intended to include
797
Page: Index Previous 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007