River Gipping
During 1791, when the Trustees were negotiating with John Rennie, they had asked him to assess an extension of the navigation from Stowmarket to the River Lark at Bury St Edmunds, but this was not pursued. With the navigation thriving, there were two proposals for canals from Ipswich to Eye, Suffolk in 1819. A meeting was held in January at Eye, which was chaired by Charles Cornwallis, 2nd Marquess Cornwallis. It considered two reports, one proposed by the civil engineer William Cubitt, which involved a tunnel through the hills at Mendlesham, with the estimated cost exceeding £100,000, and another, for a canal over the hills, costing £80,000. Both were thought to be too expensive to implement, but a third proposal emerged, for an extension from the River Gipping at Needham Market, which would follow the valley of a tributary through Creeting St Mary to Earl Stonham, where a basin would be built beside the turnpike road (now the A140 road). This would enable waggons to make a round trip from Eye in a single day, rather than the two days that a trip to Ipswich took. The scheme was estimated to cost £12,000, and shares in it were offered at the meeting. Although many were taken up, the scheme did not advance any further.
Piscataqua River border dispute
On May 29, 2001, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered the 8–0 decision of the Court. (Justice Souter recused himself from the decision; although justices often do not disclose their reasons for recusal, it is most likely because he had been the Attorney General of New Hampshire and later an associate justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in the 1970s and 1980s.) Justice Ginsburg wrote that "judicial estoppel bars New Hampshire from asserting that the Piscataqua River boundary runs along the Maine shore." Under the judicial estoppel doctrine, “Where a party assumes a certain position in a legal proceeding, and succeeds in maintaining that position, he may not thereafter, simply because his interests have changed, assume a contrary position, especially if it be to the prejudice of the party who has acquiesced in the position formerly taken by him...” Put simply: Since New Hampshire had agreed in 1977 that the border runs along the middle of the river, New Hampshire may not now claim that the border runs along the Maine riverbank. Wrote Justice Ginsburg: “New Hampshire’s claim that the Piscataqua River boundary runs along the Maine shore is clearly inconsistent with its interpretation of the words ‘Middle of the River’ during the 1970s litigation.”