Citation. 446 U.S. 500 (1980) · Read the full opinion →
Facts. Under the school land grants made at statehood, Utah was entitled to four numbered sections of every township — two, sixteen, thirty-two and thirty-six, under the Utah Enabling Act of 1894, with provision for in-lieu selections where those numbered sections were unavailable (because, for example, they had been previously reserved or were mineral lands). When large portions of Utah’s numbered school sections turned out to be encompassed within federal reservations or to be mineral in character, Utah sought to make in-lieu selections of unusually valuable federal lands, including known oil shale tracts. The Secretary of the Interior, Cecil Andrus, asserted authority under section 7 of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, as amended in 1936, to refuse selections that would result in “grossly disparate” exchanges of value. Utah challenged that authority.
Holding. The Supreme Court held that the 1936 amendment to the Taylor Grazing Act conferred on the Secretary the discretion to classify lands within a federal grazing district as proper for school indemnity selection, and that the “grossly disparate value” policy was no abuse of that discretion, 446 U.S. at 520. The Court reversed the Tenth Circuit; Utah lost. In the course of the opinion it described the grant-and-acceptance arrangement as a “solemn agreement” between the United States and the accepting state, 446 U.S. at 507 — endorsing, in terms, the characterization Utah itself pressed (“As Utah correctly emphasizes”). The phrase “binding and perpetual obligation” is not the Court’s. It appears only in Justice Powell’s dissent, 446 U.S. at 523; the word “perpetual” does not appear in the majority opinion at all. (Corrected 2026-09-11: this entry previously attributed that phrase to the Court under this heading.) The Court read the indemnity provisions in light of the underlying trust, balancing the state’s right to receive value commensurate with what it had lost against the federal government’s interest in not making windfall transfers.
Why it matters. Andrus sits alongside Lassen as the modern Supreme Court statement of the strict trust theory. Two doctrinal contributions are particularly load-bearing. First, the characterization of the grant as a “solemn agreement,” which the Court endorsed from Utah’s briefing, supports reading the grants as contractual in nature rather than as unilateral and revocable gifts. Kanaly v. State, 368 N.W.2d 819, 823 (S.D. 1985), is often cited as echoing it; in fact the South Dakota court reports the description rather than adopting it, writing that such an arrangement “has been said to create” it. Second, the dissent’s “binding and perpetual obligation” language is the source of the argument that a state may not unilaterally terminate, redirect or impair the trust corpus — an argument that travels on the dissent’s reasoning rather than on the Court’s authority. The case is sometimes read narrowly on its specific in-lieu-selection facts. [VERIFY: whether state high courts have treated its broader statements as authoritative restatements of the Lassen line; the Library holds no survey.]
Cited in.
Limits of this annotation. This entry is a scholarly summary, not a Shepardized citation analysis, and is not a substitute for current legal research. Readers should verify the case’s continuing validity in their jurisdiction before relying on it in litigation. Last updated: 2026-09-11.
