What this is
The joint New Mexico-Arizona Enabling Act, signed by President Taft on June 20, 1910, is the federal statute that authorized the people of the two remaining contiguous territories to form constitutions and state governments and to be admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original states. Its school-land provisions — Section 10 for New Mexico and the substantially identical Section 28 for Arizona — installed in federal admission law the strongest and most explicit trust language ever included in such a statute: express in-trust language for the lands and proceeds, an express breach-of-trust standard, a null-and-void clause for non-conforming dispositions, and federal Attorney General enforcement authority. The 36 Stat. 557 citation is canonical.
Why the Library cites it
The 1910 Act is the high-water mark of explicit fiduciary language in federal admission statutes. When the Library scores admission-act language strength against a four-axis rubric — express trust language, breach-of-trust standard, null-and-void clause, federal enforcement — the New Mexico-Arizona Act is the maximum score, and every other state’s federal grant language is read against this one. The Eighth Anchor’s argument that the federal government had, by 1910, learned from a century of state-level drift and codified the lessons into the strongest possible statutory protection rests on this Act. The Library uses the 1910 language as the floor below which federal admission law cannot now be plausibly read to have done less.
A representative provision
The operative trust language: “all lands hereby granted, including those which, having been heretofore granted to the said Territory, are hereby expressly transferred and confirmed to the said State, shall be by the said State held in trust, to be disposed of in whole or in part only in manner as herein provided and for the several objects specified in the respective granting and confirmatory provisions, and … the natural products and money proceeds of any of said lands shall be subject to the same trusts as the lands producing the same… . Disposition of any of said lands, or of any money or thing of value directly or indirectly derived therefrom, for any object other than for such particular lands, or the lands from which such money or thing of value shall have been derived, were granted or confirmed, or in any manner contrary to the provisions of this Act, shall be deemed a breach of trust.” The null-and-void clause and federal enforcement provision follow in the same section.
Where to find it
Library of Congress, Statutes at Large, 36 Stat. 557 — https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/61st-congress.php. The govinfo.gov fallback hosts the same materials. The Library hosts the trust-language sections excerpted in full at the entry page; the rest of the Act links out.
