Krug, Secretary of the Interior, et al. v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Co. (329 U.S. 591)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided February 3, 1947 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 329 U.S. 591 · 67 S. Ct. 540
- Decided
- February 3, 1947
- Term
- October Term 1946
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Black
- Issue area
- Economic Activity
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Mr. Justice Black delivered the opinion of the Court. In the first half of the Nineteenth Century the United States acquired a vast new area of sparsely populated lands in the South and West. Settlement and absorption of this territory into the older part of the country became a national problem which demanded for its solution a more rapid and extensive means of transportation of goods and people than was provided by wagons, stagecoaches, and waterways. The building of railroads largely provided the answer. They made it possible for the frontier homesteads and communities to be established on the lands of the new territory and yet maintain live contact with the national economy and culture. To encourage a rapid railroad building program, Congress chose to make public grants of a large proportion of the new lands to underwrite and subsidize the participation of private individuals and privately owned companies in the program. In this congressional program of land grants “in aid of construction” were sown the seeds of the present lawsuit. Enormous areas of public lands were granted railroads, almost equal to the acreage of the New England States, New York and Pennsylvania combined. Execution of the land-grant program was marked by innumerable complex and unforeseen difficulties; its course has been beset by claims and counterclaims asserted by and between settlers, railroads,…
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