The U.S. Supreme Court case Virginia v. West Virginia in 1910 was a dispute over the counties of Berkeley and Jefferson, which had been part of Virginia but were claimed by West Virginia during the Civil War when it seceded from Confederate-held territory to join the Union as a new state. The issue arose because these counties held strategic importance due to their location on key transportation routes and resources such as coal mines. After years of legal battles, this case finally reached the Supreme Court where it ruled that these two counties would remain part of West Virginia since they had been under its jurisdiction for nearly half a century at that point. This decision effectively ended any further territorial disputes between these two states.

In the dissenting opinion for Virginia v. West Virginia, 1910, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes disagreed with the majority's decision to award damages to Virginia. He argued that when West Virginia was admitted into the Union in 1863, it had agreed to take on a portion of Virginia's public debt as part of its conditions for statehood. However, he believed that this obligation was not legally enforceable by another state or by the federal government because it was essentially a political agreement between two sovereign entities - an issue outside of judicial purview. Furthermore, he contended that even if such an obligation could be enforced legally, there were too many uncertainties surrounding how much West Virginia actually owed due to factors like war and inflation since their separation from each other during Civil War times.