In the United States v. Drum et al., 1961, the Supreme Court dealt with a dispute over land ownership in Oklahoma. The federal government and several Native American tribes claimed that they held title to certain lands under an 1866 treaty, while private parties asserted their own claims based on subsequent allotments and transfers. The case hinged on whether Congress had extinguished tribal title when it opened up these lands for settlement by non-Indigenous people in the late nineteenth century. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled against the government and tribes, finding that Congress had indeed intended to terminate tribal ownership through its actions at that time. This meant that any later transactions involving those lands were valid under U.S law.

In the dissenting opinion for United States et al. v. Drum et al., it was argued that the majority's decision to uphold a lower court ruling, which found in favor of private landowners over the federal government regarding ownership of submerged lands, was incorrect and inconsistent with previous rulings on similar cases. The dissenting justices believed that this case should have been decided based on established principles of public trust doctrine, which holds that certain resources are preserved for public use and cannot be sold or transferred to private entities. They contended that these submerged lands were held in trust by the state for all citizens and therefore could not be privately owned. Furthermore, they disagreed with how the majority interpreted relevant statutes and historical documents pertaining to property rights under Spanish law (as Texas had once been part of Spain). In their view, these sources did not support an expansive interpretation of private property rights at odds with public interests.