Huber

We construe a federal surplus property agreement to determine whether the government correctly treated a condition of a transfer as breached.

Fact

The Aleutian Islands extend so far west of Alaska that, crossing the 180th Meridian, they become the easternmost part of the United States. They are a two thousand-mile-long archipelago of cold, rain, snow, and wind, that separates the North Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea. Hundreds of miles north of the Aleutians lie the even more remote Pribilof Islands, St. Paul and St. George. The islands were uninhabited, except by seals during mating season, until the Russian promyshleniki enslaved Aleuts and brought them there to harvest the seals. After the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, the Aleuts living in the Pribilofs continued to harvest seals, under a federal monopoly managed for the government by its lessee, the Alaska Commercial Company.

The Aleuts again faced terrible times during World War II. In 1942, the Japanese invaded the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska. The Japanese shipped a number of the islands’ inhabitants to Japan, where many of them died in war prisons. To protect the rest of the Aleuts, the federal…