Portal:Supreme Court of the United States

“ Every State in the Union in every instance where its sovereignty has not been delegated to the United States, I consider to be as compleatly sovereign, as the United States are in respect to the powers surrendered. The United States are sovereign as to all the powers of Government actually surrendered: Each State in the Union is sovereign as to all the powers reserved. It must necessarily be so, because the United States have no claim to any authority but such as the States have surrendered to them: Of course the part not surrendered must remain as it did before. ”

“ But the mere fact that a state law has an effect on the Yakamas while they are exercising a treaty right does not establish that the law impermissibly burdens the right itself. And the right to travel with goods is just an application of the Yakamas’ right to travel. It ensures that the Yakamas enjoy the same privileges when they travel with goods as when they travel without them. It is not an additional right to possess whatever goods they wish on the highway, immune from regulation and taxation. ”

“ Would a manufacturer of flashlights have to warn about the risks associated with leaking batteries? Would a seller of hot dog buns have to warn about the health risks of consuming processed meat? Just the threat of litigation and liability would force many manufacturers of safe products to spend time and money educating themselves and writing warnings about the dangers of other people’s more dangerous products. All this would, as well, threaten to leave consumers worse off. ”

“ The unambiguous meaning of “the Legislature” in the Elections Clause as a representative body is confirmed by other provisions of the Constitution that use the same term in the same way. When seeking to discern the meaning of a word in the Constitution, there is no better dictionary than the rest of the Constitution itself. Our precedents new and old have employed this structural method of interpretation to read the Constitution in the manner it was drafted and ratified—as a unified, coherent whole. ”

“ But it blinks reality to ignore that every word of a judicial opinion—whether it is a majority, a concurrence, or a dissent—expounds upon the law in ways that do not map neatly on to the legislative function. Setting aside summary decisions, the reader of a judicial opinion will always gain critical insight into the reasoning underlying a judicial holding by reading all opinions in their entirety. ”

“ That multilateralism is threatened if one nation alone, through application of its own liability rules (by nonexpert judges) , can shape the policy choices or actions that an international organization believes it must take or refrain from taking. Yet that is the effect of the majority’s interpretation. By restricting the immunity that international organizations enjoy, it “opens the door to divided decisions of the courts of different member states,” including U. S. courts, “passing judgment on the rules, regulations, and decisions of the international bodies.” ”

“ Will it be said, that the fifty odd thousand citizens in Delaware being associated under a State Government, stand in a rank so superior to the forty odd thousand of Philadelphia, associated under their charter, that although it may become the latter to meet an individual on an equal footing in a Court of Justice, yet that such a procedure would not comport with the dignity of the former?—In this land of equal liberty, shall forty odd thousand in one place be compellable to do justice, and yet fifty odd thousand in another place be privileged to do justice only as they may think proper? ”

“ Rarely will a court feel so certain of the wrongness of an agency's empirical judgment that it will be justified in substituting its own view of the facts. But courts can and should review agency decisionmaking closely to ensure that an agency has adequately explained the bases for its conclusions, that the various components of its policy form an internally consistent whole, and that any apparent contradictions are acknowledged and addressed. ”

“ We conclude that there is no conflict between the statute and the privilege.
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Whenever the Court is confronted with the question of a compelled disclosure that has an incriminating potential, the judicial scrutiny is invariably a close one. Tension between the State's demand for disclosures and the protection of the right against self-incrimination is likely to give rise to serious questions. Inevitably these must be resolved in terms of balancing the public need on the one hand, and the individual claim to constitutional protections on the other; neither interest can be treated lightly. ”

“ It is true that it is elaborately insisted that although there be no express constitutional provision prohibiting it, the progressive feature of the tax causes it to transcend the conception of all taxation and to be a mere arbitrary abuse of power which must be treated as wanting in due process. But the proposition disregards the fact that in the very early history of the government a progressive tax was imposed by Congress, and that such authority was exerted in some, if not all, of the various income taxes enacted prior to 1894 to which we have previously adverted. ”

“ The extension of the judiciary power of the United States to such controversies, appears to me to be wise, because it is honest, and because it is useful. It is honest, because it provides for doing justice without respect of persons, and by securing individual citizens as well as States, in their respective rights, performs the promise which every free Government makes to every free citizen, of equal justice and protection. It is useful, because it is honest, because it leaves not even the most obscure and friendless citizen without means of obtaining justice from a neighbouring State ”

“ And if the bad apples somehow pose a threat to safe travel on the highways, even Washington may regulate them as they make their way from Oregon to the reservation–just as the State may require tribal members to abide nondiscriminatory regulations governing the safe transportation of flammable cargo as they drive their gas trucks from Oregon to the reservation along public highways. The only thing that Washington may not do is reverse the promise the United States made to the Yakamas in 1855 by imposing a tax or toll on tribal members or their goods as they pass to and from market. ”

“ Upon general principles of right, shall the former when summoned to answer the fair demands of its creditor, be permitted, proteus-like, to assume a new appearance, and to insult him and justice, by declaring I am a sovereign State? Surely not. Before a claim, so contrary, in its first appearance, to the general principles of right and equality, be sustained by a just and impartial tribunal, the person, natural or artificial, entitled to make such claim, should certainly be well known and authenticated. Who, or what, is a sovereignty? ”

“ It would be strange, indeed, that the joint and equal sovereigns of this country, should, in the very Constitution by which they professed to establish justice, so far deviate from the plain path of equality and impartiality, as to give to the collective citizens of one State, a right of suing individual citizens of another State, and yet deny to those citizens a right of suing them. ”

“ Whoever considers, in a combined and comprehensive view, the general texture of the Constitution, will be satisfied, that the people of the United States intended to form themselves into a nation for national purposes. They instituted, for such purposes, a national Government, complete in all its parts, with powers Legislative, Executive and Judiciary; and, in all those powers, extending over the whole nation. ”

“ It was a considerable reduction of the power and resources of Great Britain; it placed a great body of her subjects in a state of neutrality; it lessened the commerce and revenues of her government, and eventually deprives her of a part of her dominions.
But if America is not bound by the capitulation, neither can the capitulants be bound with regard to America; for no engagement can be a valid one, which ties up the hands of one party, and leaves the other party at full liberty to exercise, on the party bound, all the rights of war. ”

“ As controversies between State and State, and between a State and citizens of another State, might tend gradually to involve States in war and bloodshed, a disinterested civil tribunal was intended to be instituted to decide such controversies, and preserve peace and friendship. Further; if a State is entitled to Justice in the Fœderal Court, against a citizen of another State, why not such citizen against the State, when the same language equally comprehends both? The rights of individuals and the justice due to them, are as dear and precious as those of States. ”

“ Now there are, in my opinion, the most essential differences between the old cases of corporations to which the law intimated has reference, and the great and extraordinary case of States separately possessing, as to every thing simply relating to themselves, the fullest powers of sovereignty, and yet in some other defined particulars subject to a superior power composed out of themselves for the common welfare of the whole. The only law concerning corporations, to which I conceive the least reference is to be had, is the common law of England on that subject. ”

“ Hence the haughty notions of state independence, state sovereignty, and state supremacy. In despotic Governments, the Government has usurped, in a similar manner, both upon the state and the people: Hence all arbitrary doctrines and pretensions concerning the Supreme, absolute, and incontrolable, power of Government. In each, man is degraded from the prime rank, which he ought to hold in human affairs: In the latter, the state as well as the man is degraded. Of both degradations, striking instances occur in history, in politics, and in common life. ”

“ In moving away from our decisions sanctioning the condemnation of harmful property use, the Court today significantly expands the meaning of public use. It holds that the sovereign may take private property currently put to ordinary private use, and give it over for new, ordinary private use, so long as the new use is predicted to generate some secondary benefit for the public–such as increased tax revenue, more jobs, maybe even aesthetic pleasure. But nearly any lawful use of real private property can be said to generate some incidental benefit to the public. ”