In the United States v. Southern Pacific Company et al., 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with a dispute over land rights in California between the federal government and Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The case centered around whether or not certain lands were part of public domain and thus available for purchase by railroad companies under an 1866 law that encouraged railway construction across America's western frontier. The court ruled in favor of Southern Pacific, stating that these lands had never been officially reserved for public use by Congress and therefore could be legally purchased by private entities such as railroads. This decision allowed Southern Pacific to retain ownership of vast tracts of Californian land it had previously acquired.

In the dissenting opinion for United States v. Southern Pacific Company et al., Justice Louis Brandeis argued that the Court should not have decided on constitutional grounds, but rather on narrower statutory ones. He believed that it was unnecessary to rule whether a railroad company could be taxed under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause because there were other valid reasons why this particular tax might be invalid. Specifically, he pointed out that Congress had already exempted railroads from certain types of taxation in an earlier act and suggested this exemption might apply here as well. By choosing to make a broad constitutional ruling instead of focusing on these more specific issues, Brandeis felt the majority was overstepping its judicial role and unnecessarily limiting future legislative options.