21.  A fellow Virginian, Marshall made the Supreme Court what it is today, defining the Constitution as an agreement among all Americans rather than among sovereign states.

22.  Bush reiterated his support Tuesday for a sovereign Palestinian state as a resolution to the violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

23.  But he often enraged Beijing with his assertions that Taiwan was already a sovereign state.

24.  But it remains necessary, in spite of all the final reservations that accompany the fateful step of attacking a fellow sovereign state in Europe.

25.  But Russia, other officials point out, if no longer a superpower is still a sovereign state.

26.  China fears the trend in the United Nations to intervene in what have long been regarded as the internal affairs of sovereign states.

27.  China has reacted with special fury to the bombing in Yugoslavia, which it portrays as an illegal act of intervention inside a sovereign state.

28.  China dislikes international economic sanctions, claiming that they represent unwarranted interference in the affairs of sovereign states.

29.  Congress, the court said, did not have the constitutional authority to intervene in the employment contracts of the sovereign states except in rare, strictly defined circumstances.

30.  David Phillips, a political analyst at Columbia University, said that international law contains a built-in tension pitting the rights of sovereign states against self-determination movements.