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Syllabus
of the River, 1785-1786 Md. Laws ch. 1 (preamble), an endeavor that would hardly have been required if, as Maryland claims, her well-settled sovereignty gave her exclusive authority to regulate all activity on the River. Accordingly, the Court reads Article Seventh simply to guarantee that each State's citizens would retain the right to build wharves and improvements regardless of which State ultimately was determined to be sovereign over the River. That would not be decided until the 1877 Black-Jenkins Award gave such sovereignty to Maryland. Unlike the 1785 Compact's Article Seventh, which concerned the rights of citizens, the plain language of the Award's Article Fourth gives Virginia, as a sovereign State, the right to use the River beyond the low-water mark. Nothing in Article Fourth suggests that Virginia's rights are subject to Maryland's regulation. Indeed, that Article limits Virginia's riparian rights only by Maryland's right of "proper use" and the proviso that Virginia not "imped[e] . . . navigation," limitations that hardly would have been necessary if Maryland retained the authority to regulate Virginia's actions. Maryland's argument to the contrary is rejected, since the States would hardly have submitted to binding arbitration "for the purpose of ascertaining and fixing the boundary" between them if that boundary was already well settled. Act of Mar. 3, 1879, ch. 196, 20 Stat. 481 (preamble). Indeed, the Black-Jenkins arbitrators' opinion dispels any doubt that sovereignty was in dispute, see, e. g., App. to Report, p. D-2, and confirms that Virginia's Article Fourth rights are sovereign rights not subject to Maryland's regulation, see id., at D-18 to D-19. Maryland's necessary concession that Virginia owns the soil to the low-water mark must also doom her claim that Virginia does not possess riparian rights to construct improvements beyond that mark and otherwise make use of the River's water. The Court rejects Maryland's remaining arguments that the Award merely confirmed the private property rights enjoyed by Virginia citizens under the 1785 Compact's Article Seventh and the common law, which rights are in turn subject to Maryland's regulation as sovereign over the River; that the Award could not have elevated the 1785 Compact's private property rights to sovereign rights; and that the requirement under the Award's Article Fourth that Virginia exercise her riparian rights on the River "without impeding the navigation or otherwise interfering with the proper use of it by Maryland" (emphasis added) indicates Maryland's continuing regulatory authority over Virginia's exercise of her riparian rights. Also rejected is Justice Kennedy's conclusion that, because the Black-Jenkins Opinion rested Virginia's prescriptive riparian rights solely on Maryland's assent to the riparian rights granted private citizens in the 1785 Compact, Maryland may regulate Virginia's right to
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