Cartographic Deference
Lucinda Widdison
Maps play a critical role in the law—in delineating boundaries[1], in establishing power[2], and even as a metaphor for the law itself.[3] Since the 1970s, the rise of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—which store and present geospatial data—agencies like the EPA and FEMA have used geographic models to produce policies for issues ranging from flood zones to wildlife biodiversity. However, maps are not neutral vessels; they are complex semiotic systems imbued with a rich visual grammar, displaying data with deeply political consequences, ranging from election results[4] to climate change.[5] Despite their complexity, maps continue to enjoy a deep trust from their readers, who rarely question the provenance or validity of the data they are seeing. By examining the historical use of maps in international diplomacy, this article explores how cartography shapes legal realities, culminating in a critique of the Supreme Court’s recent geographic line-drawing in Sackett v. EPA.
The role maps play in our legal system is far from accidental; mapping technologies emerged alongside and in response to the growing needs of nation-states to obtain accurate records to order the world around them.[6] For example, the Netherlands developed a cadastral mapping program—a highly-technical form of mapping that ties property rights to specific locations on the earth’s surface—in the 17th century to develop diking for land drainage along marine and estuarine areas.[7] Therefore, mapping technologies have helped states to order and manage their administrative needs.
By making states legible, maps are assumed to capture and reflect a fictitious geographic stasis that is exemplified in international boundary disputes. As greater fractions of the global population grow to rely on the same mapping platforms (i.e., Google Maps, Google Earth, Waymo (owned by Google), or Apple Maps), those companies have begun to play a critical role in international diplomacy decisions ranging from the war in Ukraine[8] to the Thai-Cambodian border conflict.[9] However, they have also faced criticism for perpetuating a facade that naturalizes complex international disputes against an apparently neutral backdrop.[10]
One example of the artificial neutrality in mapping technologies became apparent after President Donald Trump announced that the Gulf of Mexico would formally be renamed to the Gulf of America.[11] Google and Apple Maps changed the water body’s name on their respective platforms, drawing sharp rebuke from many US media outlets. However, they did not update the place name for all users but chose to keep the “Gulf of Mexico” name for people in Mexico, while displaying a combined “Gulf of America/Gulf of Mexico” label to people in other countries.[12] In this way, the mapping platforms sought to preserve their neutrality across nation-state borders. This “agnostic cartography” may appear to be neutral—perhaps even a source of truth—but it is ultimately a rendering of our complex geographic and cultural landscape that conforms to geopolitical preconceptions.
Because maps inherently reflect political worldviews, the power to draw the map is a profound exercise of administrative authority. Historically, U.S. courts deferred to the technical expertise of agencies like the EPA to navigate this geographic complexity. When determining the jurisdictional scope of the Clean Water Act—which protects the “waters of the United States”—the EPA mapped wetlands based on local hydrological nuance, identifying areas that possessed a “significant nexus” with traditional navigable waters.[13] However, in Sackett v. EPA, the Supreme Court abandoned this flexible approach. Instead, the Court severely limited wetland protections to only those that “form a continuous surface with [navigable] waters, making it difficult to determine where the ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetland’ begins.”[14]
This “cartographic deference,” which privileges the geographic representation of hydrological connectivity over bureaucratic decision making, adopts a veneer of objectivity to mask the uncertainty of a dynamic hydrological system. This uncertainty was reflected when the US Army Corps of Engineers, one of the two agencies tasked with CWA administration, published a tech challenge seeking support in delineating protected waterways post-Sackett, saying in their problem statement:
“The datasets, tools, and methodologies currently used to support Clean Water Act implementation often lack sufficient accuracy, consistency, transparency, spatial resolution, and temporal relevance to reliably identify areas that fall outside of Federal jurisdiction. These limitations sometimes necessitate resource-intensive field investigations or results because of outdated, inconsistent, or inaccurate geospatial data. This can hinder quality and significantly delay time-critical decision making.“[15]
The USACE does not have access to clear delineations based on the Court’s findings because they may not exist. In essence, the Court has created a definitive, static line between jurisdictional power where only fluidity exists.
The Rapanos “significant nexus” standard was controversial, because the nuanced standard required time-consuming and expensive analysis to determine whether an area constituted a protected wetland. However, the fallout from Sackett reveals a vulnerability in modern administrative law: our judiciary demands precise geospatial boundaries, yet lacks the cartographic literacy to understand that those boundaries may not be as precise as the Court would hope. As the era of agency deference wanes, courts will increasingly be forced to adjudicate between competing models, datasets, and maps. If judges continue to treat maps as neutral representations of reality rather than subjective, highly political arguments, ‘cartographic deference’ will simply replace agency deference. The legal profession must learn to read the mapmaker’s pen just as critically as the legislator’s text.
[1] Ethan R. Merel, Note, Google’s World: The Impact of “Agnostic Cartographers” on the State-Dominated International Legal System, 54 Colum. J. Transnat’l L. 424, 424-426 (2016).
[2] Sabarish Suresh, The Cartojuridism of the British East India Company, 42 Law & Hist. Rev. 469, 470 (2024).
[3] Stephen Bottomley, Corporate law, Complexity and Cartography 35 Aust Jnl. of Corp. Law 142, 142 (2020)
[4] Lily Houtman, Mapping U.S. Elections: An Empirical Analysis of Design Techniques, Abstracts of the International Cartographic Association, Sep. 2022, at 1.
[5] Carolyn Fish, Cartographic Content Analysis of Compelling Climate change Communication,47 Cartography and Geographic Information Science 492, 492 (2020).
[6] Michael P. Conzen, Legal History: The Inherent Power in Mapping Ownership, 92 Mich. L. Rev. 1637 (1994), (Reviewing Roger J.P. Kain & Elizabeth Baigent The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (1992)).
[7] Id.
[8] Vittoria Elliot, Ukrainians are scrubbing open-source maps to keep intel from Russia’s army, rest of world, (April 11, 2022), https://restofworld.org/2022/ukrainians-osint-maps-russia/.
[9] Puntid Tantivangphaisal, Google accused of ‘fake maps’ in Thailand-Cambodia temple spat, Thaiger (July3, 2025), https://thethaiger.com/news/national/google-accused-of-fake-maps-in-thailand-cambodia-temple-spat.
[10] Merel, supra note 1, at 431.
[11] Drew Angerer, Here’s How All Online Maps Are Handling the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Name Change, WIRED, (Feb 11, 2025) https://www.wired.com/story/online-maps-gulf-of-mexico-name-change/.
[12] Id.
[13] Rapanos v. United States, 547 U.S. 715, 767 (2006).
[14] Sackett v. EPA, 598 U.S. 651, 678-679 (2023).
[15] ERDC WERX (on behalf of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), https://www.erdcwerx.org/supporting-objective-determinations-of-areas-that-are-not-wotus-post-sackett-using-geospatial-tools/ (last visited April 6, 2026).