land originally claimed but not awarded. (13) The General Accounting Office also noted that Congress may disagree with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Sandoval 1897 decision and decide that it should be legislatively overruled , by addressing the affected land grants in some way or taking other action . (14) The State of New Mexico’s response to such report, dated August 14, 2008, and entitled Report to the New Mexico Attorney General—A Response to the GAO’s 2004 Report Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: Findings and Possible Options Regarding Longstanding Community Land Grant Claims in New Mexico , found the following: (A) The Federal Government had a duty to correctly confirm land grants-mercedes in New Mexico and that duty was understated by the analysis of the General Accounting Office. (B) Most land grants-mercedes were not confirmed by the Federal Government in the correct type of land ownership pattern, as granted by Spain or Mexico to be held in common by the entire community, but rather the vast majority were confirmed as privately owned by the family of a single petitioner or as tenancy-in-common. The tenancy-in-common designation was foreign to Spanish and Mexican jurisprudence and left land grants-mercedes subject to partition suits that resulted in the significant loss of common land. These facts were omitted by the General Accounting Office report. (C) Most postconfirmation land losses were the direct result of the improper nature of the Federal confirmation, and erroneous Federal confirmations could not be remedied in the court system, contrary to the analysis of the General Accounting Office. (D) Many land grants-mercedes or their common lands were improperly rejected in their entirety, others lost substantial amounts of acreage by improper application of boundary descriptions, and others were foreclosed from being confirmed by earlier adverse rulings. (E) The Federal Government in a great many cases did not provide constitutionally sufficient notice of its confirmation activities, which contributed directly