UNITED STATES v. IDAHO, ex rel. DIRECTOR, IDAHO DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES (508 U.S. 1)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided May 3, 1993 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 508 U.S. 1 · 113 S. Ct. 1893
- Decided
- May 3, 1993
- Term
- October Term 1992
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Rehnquist
- Issue area
- Federalism
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Chief Justice Rehnquist delivered the opinion of the Court. The McCarran Amendment allows a State to join the United States as a defendant in a comprehensive water right adjudication. 66 Stat. 560, 43 U. S. C. § 666(a). This ease arises from Idaho’s joinder of the United States in a suit for the adjudication of water rights in the Snake River. Under Idaho Code §42-1414 (1990), all water right claimants, including the United States, must pay “filing fees” when they submit their notices of claims. Idaho collects these fees to “finane[e] the costs of adjudicating water rights,” §42-1414; the United States estimates that in its case the fees could exceed $10 million. We hold that the McCarran Amendment does not waive the United States’ sovereign immunity from fees of this kind. Discovered by the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Snake River — the “Mississippi of Idaho” — is 1,038 miles long and the principal tributary to the Columbia River. It rises in the mountains of the Continental Divide in northwest Wyoming and enters eastern Idaho through the Palisades Reservoir. Near Heise, Idaho, the river leaves the mountains and meanders westerly across southern Idaho’s Snake River plain for the entire breadth of the State — some 400 miles. On the western edge of Idaho, near Weiser, the Snake enters Oregon for a while and then turns northward, forming the Oregon-Idaho boundary for 216…
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