Portal:Supreme Court of the United States

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sea is open to all nations: No nation has an exclusive property in the sea. Put the case then, that a privateer meets a ship at sea; is it to be inferred, from the mere circumstance of the ship’s being found on the high seas, that she is the property of an enemy? Surely there is no ground for such an inference: On this ground a privateer might seize and capture the ships of its own nation. But the privateer attacks, seizes, captures and brings the ship into port: It is plain here is an act of violence ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every man must know that no suit can lie against a Legislative body. His only dependence therefore can be, that the Legislature on principles of public duty, will make a provision for the execution of their own contracts, and if that fails, whatever reproach the Legislature may incur, the case is certainly without remedy in any of the Courts of the State. It never was pretended, even in the case of the crown in England, that if any contract was made with Parliament, or with the crown by virtue of an authority from Parliament, that a Petition to the crown would in such case lie. ”

“ In the United States, and in the several States, which compose the Union, we go not so far: but still we go one step farther than we ought to go in this unnatural and inverted order of things. The states, rather than the people, for whose sakes the States exist, are frequently the objects which attract and arrest our principal attention. This, I believe, has produced much of the confusion and perplexity, which have appeared in several proceedings and several publications on state-politics, and on the politics, too, of the United States. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The question to be determined is, whether this State, so respectable, and whose claim soars so high, is amenable to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States? This question, important in itself, will depend on others, more important still; and, may, perhaps, be ultimately resolved into one, no less radical than this—“do the people of the United States form a Nation?”
A cause so conspicuous and interesting, should be carefully and accurately viewed from every possible point of sight; I shall examine it, 1st. By the principles of general jurisprudence. ”

“ I wish the State of society was so far improved, and the science of Government advanced to such a degree of perfection, as that the whole nation could in the peaceable course of law, be compelled to do justice, and be sued by individual citizens. ”

“ Subject to this restriction, the whole business of organizing the Courts, and directing the methods of their proceeding where necessary, I conceive to be in the discretion of Congress. If it shall be found on this occasion, or on any other, that the remedies now in being are defective, for any purpose it is their duty to provide for, they no doubt will provide others. It is their duty to legislate so far as is necessary to carry the Constitution into effect. It is ours only to judge. ”

“ As the state of nature was a state of peace, and not a state of war, the natural state of nations is a state of peace and society, and hence it is a maxim of the law of nations, founded on every principle of reason, justice and morality, that one nation ought not to do an injury to another. ”

“ The Court rightfully admits, however, that the judiciary cannot get bogged down in predictive judgments about whether the public will actually be better off after a property transfer. In any event, this constraint has no realistic import. For who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive possible use of her property? The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory. ”

“ The ministers, dignified very properly by the appellation of the magistrates, have wished, and have succeeded in their wish, to be considered as the sovereigns of the State. This second degree of perversion is confined to the old world, and begins to diminish even there: but the first degree is still too prevalent, even in the several States, of which our union is composed. By a State I mean, a complete body of free persons united together for their common benefit, to enjoy peaceably what is their own, and to do justice to others. It is an artificial person. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is it altogether a vain expectation, that a State may have other motives than such as arise from the apprehension of coercion, to carry into execution a judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, though not conformable to their own ideas of justice? ”

“ The only reason, I believe, why a free man is bound by human laws, is, that he binds himself. Upon the same principles, upon which he becomes bound by the laws, he becomes amenable to the Courts of Justice, which are formed and authorised by those laws. If one free man, an original sovereign, may do all this; why may not an aggregate of free men, a collection of original sovereigns, do this likewise? If the dignity of each singly is undiminished; the dignity of all jointly must be unimpaired. ”

“ The writers upon the law of nations, speaking of the different kinds of war, distinguish them into perfect and imperfect: A perfect war is that which destroys the national peace and tranquillity, and lays the foundation of every possible act of hostility: The imperfect war is that which does not entirely destroy the public tranquillity, but interrupts it only in some particulars, as in the case of reprisals. ”

“ Blair, Justice.⁠My sentiments have coincided, ’till this moment, with the sentiments entertained by the majority of the Court; but a doubt has just occurred, which I think it my duty to declare.
I do not conceive, indeed, that any judgment, can be binding upon the rights and interests of a third person, who is not a party to the suit. The very nature of a bill of Interpleader pre-supposes, that the party by whom it is exhibited, would be liable a second time, if he should either voluntarily, or otherwise, pay the money which he owes, to a wrong claimant. ”

“ Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not. Once one accepts, as the Court at least nominally does, ante, at 477, that the Public Use Clause is a limit on the eminent domain power of the Federal Government and the States, there is no justification for the almost complete deference it grants to legislatures as to what satisfies it. ”

“ If upon a fair construction of the Constitution of the United States, the power contended for really exists, it undoubtedly may be exercised, though it be a power of the first impression. If it does not exist, upon that authority, ten thousand examples of similar powers would not warrant its assumption. ”