Page:Alabama v. North Carolina, 560 U.S. (2010) slip opinion.pdf/12

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1879.

The sanctions expressly identified in Article 7(F)—“suspension” of rights and “revocation” of party-state status—flow directly from the Commission’s power in Articles 4(E)(7) and (11) to revoke a party State’s member­ship. That can fairly be understood to include the lesser power to suspend a party State’s rights. There is no simi­lar grounding in Article 4(E) of authority to impose mone­tary sanctions, and the absence is significant. According to Plaintiffs, however, the word “sanctions” in Article 7(F) naturally “includ[es]” monetary sanctions. Since the Compact contains no definition of “sanctions,” we give the word its ordinary meaning. A “sanction” (in the sense the word is used here) is “[t]he detriment loss of reward, or other coercive intervention, annexed to a viola­tion of a law as a means of enforcing the law.” Webster’s New International Dictionary 2211 (2d ed. 1957) (herein­ after Webster’s Second); see Black’s Law Dictionary 1458 (9th ed. 2009) (“A penalty or coercive measure that results from failure to comply with a law, rule, or order”). A monetary penalty is assuredly one kind of “sanction.” See generally Department of Energy v. Ohio, 503 U. S. 607, 621 (1992). But there are many others, ranging from the withholding of benefits, or the imposition of a nonmone­tary obligation, to capital punishment. The Compact surely does not authorize the Commission to impose all of them.

Ultimately, context dictates precisely which “sanctions” are authorized under Article 7(F), and nothing in the Compact suggests that these include monetary measures. The only two “sanctions” specifically identified as being included within Article 7(F) are “suspension” of a State’s rights under the Compact and “revocation” of its status as a party State. These are arguably merely examples, and may not exhaust the universe of sanctions the Commission