In my country, two states (Kerala and Karnataka) sued each other to get exclusive rights over an acronym. They spent 7 years engaged in a legal battle and eventually they went back to square one with the courts permitting both states to use the acronym.
Both of them probably spent millions on the case just to get nothing. They are both states in the same country so why are they allowed to sue other for bs reasons? What a waste of tax payer money.
Under a federation the subdivisions aren’t just “convenient units”, they should be able to behave in their own interest. And when the interests of different units conflict, they got to solve it some way.
Suing each other might look like a waste of money, but it’s less wasteful than the alternatives, and still respects the principles of a federation (as having the central government dictating it out of the blue deprives the states of agency).
For reference, a century ago my homeland (Paraná) was disputing area with another state (Santa Catarina), even if both are controlled by the same federation (Brazil). The legal dispute lasted so long that it enabled a civil war, since neither side was properly supporting the population dislodged by a railway company.
When was that? 1800s?
It’s bizarre to talk about XX century events as “a century ago”, but accurate in this case: 1912-16.