Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“ Dec. 669, 673: 'Jurisdiction, unqualified, being, as it is, the sovereign authority to make, decide on, and execute laws, a concurrence of jurisdiction, therefore, must entitle Indiana to as much power-legislative, judicial, and executive-as that possessed by Kentucky over so much of the Ohio river as flows between them.'
The conveniences and inconveniences of concurrent jurisdiction both are obvious, and do not need to be stated. We have nothing to do with them when the law-making power has spoken. ”

“ It hardly is necessary to be curious or technical when dealing with law-making power, in inquiring precisely what legal conceptions shall be invoked in order to bring to pass what the legislature enacts. If the law-making power says that a matter with in its competence shall be so, so it will be, so far as legal theory is concerned, without regard to the elegantia juris, or whether it fits that theory or not. But there is no trouble in giving the subsequently formed states the benefit of this legislation. ”

“ That denial could be justified only on the ground that the compact of Virginia and the act of Congress of February 4, 1791 [1 Stat. at L. 189, chap. 4] admitting Kentucky to the Union, did not confer the right of jurisdiction which the Indiana court attempted to exercise and which the state of Indiana claims. The judgment and the opinion of the court of appeals both disclose that the decision was against the right under the statutes referred to, and that it was on that ground only that the Indiana judgment was denied any force or effect. ”