When it heard Marbury's case in February 1803, the Court consisted of Chief Justice John Marshall, appointed by President John Adams in 1801, with Justices William Paterson, Samuel Chase and Bushrod Washington; Justices William Cushing and Alfred Moore took no part. Marshall had himself been Adams's Secretary of State and had affixed the seal to the very commissions now in dispute. Because the Repeal Act and the Judiciary Act of 1802 rearranged its calendar, the Court had not sat since December 1801, and it met in a committee room of the unfinished Capitol.
Frequently Cited
“Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power.”
“The language of § 17(a) strongly suggests that Congress contemplated a scienter requirement under § 17(a)(1), but not under § 17(a)(2) or § 17(a)(3).”
Aaron v. SEC, Opinion of the Court (Justice Stewart), Part II
“The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and the primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution.”
“It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”
“What our Constitution indispensably protects is the freedom of each of us, be he Jew or Agnostic, Christian or Atheist, Buddhist or Freethinker, to believe or disbelieve, to worship or not worship, to pray or keep silent, according to his own conscience, uncoerced and unrestrained by government.”
“This Court repeatedly has recognized that civil commitment for any purpose constitutes a significant deprivation of liberty that requires due process protection.”
Addington v. Texas, Opinion of the Court (Chief Justice Burger), Part III-A
“The individual should not be asked to share equally with society the risk of error when the possible injury to the individual is significantly greater than any possible harm to the state.”
Addington v. Texas, Opinion of the Court (Chief Justice Burger), Part III-A
“For the reasons that follow, we hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but that cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.”
“We hold that this challenge to an apportionment presents no nonjusticiable "political question."”
Baker v. Carr, Opinion of the Court (Brennan, J.), Part IV
“The doctrine of which we treat is one of "political questions," not one of "political cases."”
Baker v. Carr, Opinion of the Court (Brennan, J.), Part IV
“The Court's authority — possessed of neither the purse nor the sword — ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction.”
Baker v. Carr, Dissent of Justice Frankfurter, opening
“The Constitution was ordained and established by the people of the United States for themselves, for their own government, and not for the government of the individual States.”
“Under such circumstances, materiality "will depend at any given time upon a balancing of both the indicated probability that the event will occur and the anticipated magnitude of the event in light of the totality of the company activity.”
“Any showing that severs the link between the alleged misrepresentation and either the price received (or paid) by the plaintiff, or his decision to trade at a fair market price, will be sufficient to rebut the presumption of reliance.”
“To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Buck v. Bell, Opinion of the Court (Justice Holmes)
“It is the usual last resort of constitutional arguments to point out shortcomings of this sort.”
Buck v. Bell, Opinion of the Court (Justice Holmes)
“But the object and end of all government is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the community by which it is established; and it can never be assumed, that the government intended to diminish its power of accomplishing the end for which it was created.”
“While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget, that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation.”
“We cannot affirm petitioner's conviction without recognizing a general duty between all participants in market transactions to forgo actions based on material, nonpublic information.”
“I would read § 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 to encompass and build on this principle: to mean that a person who has misappropriated nonpublic information has an absolute duty to disclose that information or to refrain from trading.”
“Thus, the test is whether the insider personally will benefit, directly or indirectly, from his disclosure. Absent some personal gain, there has been no breach of duty to stockholders. And absent a breach by the insider, there is no derivative breach.”
Dirks v. SEC, Opinion of the Court (Justice Powell), Part III–C
“The elements of fiduciary duty and exploitation of nonpublic information also exist when an insider makes a gift of confidential information to a trading relative or friend.”
Dirks v. SEC, Opinion of the Court (Justice Powell), Part III–C
“The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause.”
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
“Stare decisis is the Latin phrase for a foundation stone of the rule of law: that things decided should stay decided unless there is a very good reason for change.”
“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?”
“We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
“And my opinion is, that, under the Constitution of the United States, every free person born on the soil of a State, who is a citizen of that State by force of its Constitution or laws, is also a citizen of the United States.”
“it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.”
“Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion.”
“The words "manipulative or deceptive" used in conjunction with "device or contrivance" strongly suggest that § 10(b) was intended to proscribe knowing or intentional misconduct.”
“That Amendment requires the state to be a neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and nonbelievers; it does not require the state to be their adversary.”
“The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. New Jersey has not breached it here.”
“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.”
“No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.”
“It is, then, the unanimous opinion of the court, that, in this case, the estate having passed into the hands of a purchaser for a valuable consideration, without notice, the state of Georgia was restrained, either by general principles which are common to our free institutions, or by the particular provisions of the constitution of the United States, from passing a law whereby the estate of the plaintiff in the premises so purchased could be constitutionally and legally impaired and rendered null and void.”
Fletcher v. Peck, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), on the rescinding act
“When, then, a law is in its nature a contract, when absolute rights have vested under that contract, a repeal of the law cannot devest those rights”
Fletcher v. Peck, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), on the power of a later legislature
“Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse.”
Gibbons v. Ogden, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), on the meaning of commerce
“This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution.”
Gibbons v. Ogden, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), on the power to regulate
“The United States Supreme Court says I am entitled to be represented by Counsel.”
“That government hires lawyers to prosecute and defendants who have the money hire lawyers to defend are the strongest indications of the widespread belief that lawyers in criminal courts are necessities, not luxuries.”
“For present purposes we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press — which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress — are among the fundamental personal rights and "liberties" protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States.”
“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth.”
“Our case law firmly establishes Congress’ power to regulate purely local activities that are part of an economic “class of activities” that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.”
“If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything–and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”
“The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”
“I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to. invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision.”
“The conception of the spending power advocated by Hamilton and strongly reinforced by Story has prevailed over that of Madison, which has not been lacking in adherents.”
“Nor is the concept of the general welfare static. Needs that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be interwoven in our day with the well-being of the nation.”
“The hope behind this statute is to save men and women from the rigors of the poor house as well as from the haunting fear that such a lot awaits them when journey's end is near.”
“We are obliged to conclude that an act making mere promises to pay dollars a legal tender in payment of debts previously contracted, is not a means appropriate, plainly adapted, really calculated to carry into effect any express power vested in Congress; that such an act is inconsistent with the spirit of the Constitution; and that it is prohibited by the Constitution.”
“But the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint.”
“Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
“Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”
“It should be noted, to begin with, that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.”
“Three such tests may be gleaned from our cases. First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion, Board of Education v. Allen, 392 U.S. 236, 243 (1968); finally, the statute must not foster "an excessive government entanglement with religion."”
Lemon v. Kurtzman, Opinion of the Court (Chief Justice Burger), Part II
“Judicial caveats against entanglement must recognize that the line of separation, far from being a "wall," is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.”
Lemon v. Kurtzman, Opinion of the Court (Chief Justice Burger), Part III
“Obviously, direct control of medical practice in the states is beyond the power of the federal government.”
“They are diseased and proper subjects for such treatment, and we cannot possibly conclude that a physician acted improperly or unwisely or for other than medical purposes solely because he has dispensed to one of them in the ordinary course and in good faith, four small tablets of morphine or cocaine for relief of conditions incident to addiction.”
“Statutes of the nature of that under review, limiting the hours in which grown and intelligent men may labor to earn their living, are mere meddlesome interferences with the rights of the individual”
“General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.”
“The Act was designed to apply to those persons engaged in the investment-advisory profession—those who provide personalized advice attuned to a client's concerns, whether by written or verbal communication.”
Lowe v. SEC, Opinion of the Court (Justice Stevens), Part III
“The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free.”
Mapp v. Ohio, Opinion of the Court (Clark, J.), Part V
“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.”
Mapp v. Ohio, Opinion of the Court (Clark, J.), Part V
“It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.”
Marbury v. Madison, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), on the third question
“The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws whenever he receives an injury.”
Marbury v. Madison, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), on the second question
“The Government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men.”
Marbury v. Madison, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), on the second question
“In considering this question, then, we must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding.”
“Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are Constitutional.”
“Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
“The very essence of the liberty which they guaranty is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say, at least where the compulsion is to bear false witness to his religion.”
“Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed.”
Miranda v. Arizona, Opinion of the Court (Warren, C.J.), summary of the holding
“All these policies point to one overriding thought: the constitutional foundation underlying the privilege is the respect a government — state or federal — must accord to the dignity and integrity of its citizens.”
“The Framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it, and for over 200 years both our decisions and Congress's actions have reflected this understanding.”
“In determining the extent of the constitutional protection, it has been generally, if not universally, considered that it is the chief purpose of the guaranty to prevent previous restraints upon publication.”
“The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy consistent with constitutional privilege.”
“Thus we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
“The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with 'actual malice'—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
“That is a fundamental right. Employees have as clear a right to organize and select their representatives for lawful purposes as the respondent has to organize its business and select its own officers and agents.”
“Although activities may be intrastate in character when separately considered, if they have such a close and substantial relation to interstate commerce that their control is essential or appropriate to protect that commerce from burdens and obstructions, Congress cannot be denied the power to exercise that control.”
“We are asked to shut our eyes to the plainest facts of our national life and to deal with the question of direct and indirect effects in an intellectual vacuum.”
“Contracts, however express, cannot fetter the constitutional authority of the Congress. Contracts may create rights of property, but, when contracts deal with a subject-matter which lies within the control of the Congress, they have a congenital infirmity.”
“Just men regard repudiation and spoliation of citizens by their sovereign with abhorrence; but we are asked to affirm that the Constitution has granted power to accomplish both.”
“A finding of "mental illness" alone cannot justify a State's locking a person up against his will and keeping him indefinitely in simple custodial confinement.”
“In short, a State cannot constitutionally confine without more a nondangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.”
“Unjustified isolation, we hold, is properly regarded as discrimination based on disability.”
Olmstead v. L. C., Opinion of the Court (Justice Ginsburg), Part III-A
“we think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”
“The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”
“The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
“It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution rather than inventing one, when we amend its provisions so breezily.”
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.”
“There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”
“Section 21.031 imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status.”
Plyler v. Doe, Opinion of the Court (Justice Brennan), Part III-B
“However, the Constitution does not constitute us as "Platonic Guardians" nor does it vest in this Court the authority to strike down laws because they do not meet our standards of desirable social policy, "wisdom," or "common sense."”
Plyler v. Doe, Dissent of Chief Justice Burger (excerpt)
“A tax upon one's whole income is a tax upon the annual receipts from his whole property, and as such falls within the same class as a tax upon that property, and is a direct tax, in the meaning of the constitution.”
“If it be true that the constitution should have been so framed that a tax of this kind could be laid, the instrument defines the way for its amendment.”
“A note is presumed to be a "security," and that presumption may be rebutted only by a showing that the note bears a strong resemblance (in terms of the four factors we have identified) to one of the enumerated categories of instrument.”
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions,—I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”
Reynolds v. United States, Opinion of the Court (Waite, C.J.), quoting Jefferson's 1802 reply to the Danbury Baptist Association
“Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.”
“Our task, of course, is to resolve the issue by constitutional measurement, free of emotion and of predilection.”
Roe v. Wade, Opinion of the Court (Justice Blackmun), introduction
“This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
Roe v. Wade, Opinion of the Court (Justice Blackmun), Part VIII
“As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”
“Education, of course, is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution. Nor do we find any basis for saying it is implicitly so protected.”
“The method of financing public schools in Texas, as in almost every other State, has resulted in a system of public education that can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust. It does not follow, however, and I cannot find, that this system violates the Constitution of the United States.”
“In my judgment, the right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned, is far too vital to permit state discrimination on grounds as tenuous as those presented by this record.”
“The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.”
“Failure to disclose material facts must be deemed fraud or deceit within its intended meaning, for, as the experience of the 1920's and 1930's amply reveals, the darkness and ignorance of commercial secrecy are the conditions upon which predatory practices best thrive.”
“The high standards of business morality exacted by our laws regulating the securities industry do not permit an investment adviser to trade on the market effect of his own recommendations without fully and fairly revealing his personal interests in these recommendations to his clients.”
“There is no reason to distinguish between promises of fixed returns and promises of variable returns for purposes of the test, so understood.”
SEC v. Edwards, Opinion of the Court (Justice O'Connor), Part II
“We hold that an investment scheme promising a fixed rate of return can be an "investment contract" and thus a "security" subject to the federal securities laws.”
SEC v. Edwards, Opinion of the Court (Justice O'Connor), Part II
“In other words, an investment contract for purposes of the Securities Act means a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person invests his money in a common enterprise and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party”
“It embodies a flexible rather than a static principle, one that is capable of adaptation to meet the countless and variable schemes devised by those who seek the use of the money of others on the promise of profits.”
“Thus, the mistrust of arbitration that formed the basis for the Wilko opinion in 1953 is difficult to square with the assessment of arbitration that has prevailed since that time.”
“But after a statute has been construed, either by this Court or by a consistent course of decision by other federal judges and agencies, it acquires a meaning that should be as clear as if the judicial gloss had been drafted by the Congress itself.”
“no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them all, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
“It is quite clear, then, that there is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of a State, which are distinct from each other, and which depend upon different characteristics or circumstances in the individual.”
“And, in my judgment, the right of any citizen to follow whatever lawful employment he chooses to adopt (submitting himself to all lawful regulations) is one of his most valuable rights, and one which the legislature of a State cannot invade, whether restrained by its own constitution or not.”
“And, of course, when the second section is thus harmonized with and made as it was intended to be the complement of the first, it becomes obvious that the criteria to be resorted to in any given case for the purpose of ascertaining whether violations of the section have been committed is the rule of reason, guided by the established law and by the plain duty to enforce the prohibitions of the act, and thus the public policy which its restrictions were obviously enacted to subserve.”
“The Nation had been rid of human slavery—fortunately, as all now feel—but the conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another kind of slavery sought to be fastened on the American people, namely, the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessaries of life.”
“What is more important, the University of Texas Law School possesses to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school.”
“It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
“It may be that the Nation has outworn the old-fashioned slogan that "children are to be seen not heard," but one may, I hope, be permitted to harbor the thought that taxpayers send children to school on the premise that at their age they need to learn, not teach.”
“Yet it is an elemental canon of statutory construction that where a statute expressly provides a particular remedy or remedies, a court must be chary of reading others into it.”
“The opinion of the court, after mature deliberation, is, that this is a contract, the obligation of which cannot be impaired, without violating the constitution of the United States.”
“management's fear of exposing itself to substantial liability may cause it simply to bury the shareholders in an avalanche of trivial information a result that is hardly conducive to informed decisionmaking.”
“Put another way, there must be a substantial likelihood that the disclosure of the omitted fact would have been viewed by the reasonable investor as having significantly altered the "total mix" of information made available.”
“Many decisions of this Court, however, have unequivocally reaffirmed the holding of Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803), that "[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."”
“However, neither the doctrine of separation of powers nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”
“Under this theory, a fiduciary's undisclosed, self-serving use of a principal's information to purchase or sell securities, in breach of a duty of loyalty and confidentiality, defrauds the principal of the exclusive use of that information.”
“the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens”
“The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.”
“The power to tax may be exercised oppressively upon persons, but the responsibility of the legislature is not to the courts, but to the people by whom its members are elected.”
“Throughout the Nation, Americans are engaged in an earnest and profound debate about the morality, legality, and practicality of physician-assisted suicide. Our holding permits this debate to continue, as it should in a democratic society.”
“to call such an order for the use of morphine a physician's prescription would be so plain a perversion of meaning that no discussion of the subject is required”
“What is this freedom? The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law.”
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.”
“But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'”
“That appellee's own contribution to the demand for wheat may be trivial by itself is not enough to remove him from the scope of federal regulation where, as here, his contribution, taken together with that of many others similarly situated, is far from trivial.”
“The essence of all that has been said and written on the subject is that only those interests of the highest order and those not otherwise served can overbalance legitimate claims to the free exercise of religion.”
“A way of life, however virtuous and admirable, may not be interposed as a barrier to reasonable state regulation of education if it is based on purely secular considerations; to have the protection of the Religion Clauses, the claims must be rooted in religious belief.”
“The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties, and with the acts of congress.”
Worcester v. Georgia, Opinion of the Court (Marshall, C.J.), conclusion on the status of the Cherokee Nation
“The very term 'nation,' so generally applied to them, means 'a people distinct from others.'”
“Persons who have been involuntarily committed are entitled to more considerate treatment and conditions of confinement than criminals whose conditions of confinement are designed to punish.”
“the decision, if made by a professional, is presumptively valid; liability may be imposed only when the decision by the professional is such a substantial departure from accepted professional judgment, practice, or standards as to demonstrate that the person responsible actually did not base the decision on such a judgment.”
“In the framework of our Constitution, the President's power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.”
“When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain.”
“When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter.”
“We believe that the program challenged here is a program of true private choice, consistent with Mueller, Witters, and Zobrest, and thus constitutional.”
In the final days of his administration in March 1801, President John Adams nominated, and the Senate confirmed, dozens of justices of the peace for the District of Columbia under a new organic act. William Marbury was one of them.
In January 1795 the Georgia legislature sold roughly thirty-five million acres of its western lands, much of present Alabama and Mississippi, to four land companies for $500,000. It soon emerged that nearly every legislator who voted for the sale had been promised shares or money by the purchasers.
Congress chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, five years after the charter of the first national bank, created in 1791 on Alexander Hamilton's plan, had lapsed. The new bank opened a branch in Baltimore.
Dartmouth College began as the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock's charity school for teaching Indian youth to read and instructing them in the Christian faith. Funds raised in England, with the Earl of Dartmouth among the trustees of the English contributions, allowed Wheelock to seek a charter, and on 13 December 1769 the royal governor of New Hampshire, acting in the name of George III, incorporated twelve trustees with power to govern the college and fill their own vacancies.
After Robert Fulton's steamboat made its run up the Hudson in 1807, the New York legislature confirmed and extended an exclusive right, held by Fulton and Robert R. Livingston, to navigate all state waters with vessels propelled by steam. Anyone else needed their license.
In the late 1820s the Cherokee Nation, whose lands lay largely within Georgia's chartered limits, adopted a written constitution. Georgia responded by extending its jurisdiction over Cherokee country, and the discovery of gold in 1829 sharpened the conflict.
John Barron and John Craig owned a profitable wharf on the eastern side of Baltimore harbor, where deep water had let large ships tie up and unload. In the course of paving streets and regrading the town, the city of Baltimore turned the courses of several streams, which then carried sand and earth down into the harbor and left the water at the wharf too shallow for most vessels.
In 1785 the Massachusetts legislature incorporated the Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge to span the river between Boston and Charlestown, where Harvard College had held a ferry right since 1650. The charter let the proprietors collect tolls for forty years and required them to pay the college two hundred pounds a year for the loss of its ferry; in 1792, when a second bridge to Cambridge was authorized, the term was lengthened to seventy years.
Dred Scott was held as a slave by Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon who took him in the 1830s to the free state of Illinois and then to Fort Snelling, in a part of the Wisconsin Territory where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 forbade slavery. There Scott married Harriet Robinson, and the family later returned to Missouri.
Lambdin P. Milligan was an Indiana lawyer and Democrat who opposed the war policies of the Lincoln administration. On 5 October 1864, during the presidential campaign, he was arrested at his home by order of General Alvin P. Hovey, commander of the military district of Indiana, and accused of joining a secret society that planned to free Confederate prisoners and seize federal arsenals.
Before the Civil War the paper money of the United States consisted chiefly of notes issued by hundreds of state-chartered banks, of uneven credit and value. During the war Congress created a national currency: United States notes issued by the Treasury, and notes of new national banks chartered under the National Bank Acts of 1863 and 1864.
To pay for the Civil War, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 25 February 1862, which authorized paper United States notes, soon called greenbacks, and declared them lawful money and a legal tender for all debts public and private. The notes were not redeemable in gold on demand, and they quickly traded below coin.
In Hepburn v. Griswold (February 1870) a divided Court had held that the Legal Tender Act of 1862 could not make paper United States notes a legal tender for debts incurred before the act.
In March 1869 the Louisiana legislature passed an act entitled "An act to protect the health of the city of New Orleans," which chartered the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company and gave it for twenty-five years the sole right to maintain stock landings and slaughterhouses in the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard. Every butcher in that district of over a thousand square miles had to bring his animals to the company's slaughterhouse below the city and pay its fees.
After the Civil War, Chicago became the greatest grain market in the world. Wheat and corn from the prairie states arrived by rail and were lifted by steam-powered elevators into enormous warehouses before shipment east.
In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, making it a crime in the federal territories to marry a second spouse while the first was living. The law was aimed at plural marriage as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah Territory, but was seldom enforced for a decade.
The Wilson Tariff Act of 28 August 1894, which became law without President Cleveland's signature, lowered tariff rates and imposed a two percent tax on incomes above $4,000 a year, including rents, interest, dividends and business profits, for the years 1895 through 1899. Charles Pollock, a shareholder of the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company of New York, sued to stop the company from paying the tax, a form of suit that allowed the question to reach the courts before collection.
In 1890 Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, requiring railways to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" and making it a crime for a passenger to sit in a coach assigned to the other race. A group of New Orleans citizens of color, the Comité des Citoyens, organized a test case.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents who lived there as merchants and were subjects of the Emperor of China. His parents returned to China in 1890.
A Massachusetts statute authorized the board of health of any city or town to require the vaccination of its inhabitants when it judged that necessary for public health or safety, and provided a five-dollar penalty for adults who refused; children certified by a physician as unfit for vaccination were exempt. In February 1902, during a smallpox outbreak, the Cambridge board of health ordered all inhabitants who had not been vaccinated since 1897 to be vaccinated, and offered vaccination without charge.
In 1895 New York passed the Bakeshop Act, which regulated the sanitation of bakeries and provided that no employee could be required or permitted to work in a bakery more than sixty hours a week or ten hours a day. The hours provision was carried into the state's Labor Law of 1897.
In 1870 John D. Rockefeller, his brother William, Henry M. Flagler and others organized the Standard Oil Company of Ohio to refine crude oil. Over the next decade the company acquired or allied itself with most of its competitors, and in 1882 the stockholders of some forty companies placed their shares with nine trustees, creating the Standard Oil Trust.
The United States entered the First World War in April 1917. In May Congress passed the Selective Service Act, providing for conscription, and in June the Espionage Act, which made it a crime during wartime to cause or attempt to cause insubordination in the armed forces or to obstruct recruiting or enlistment.
The Harrison Narcotic Act, signed on 17 December 1914, was written as a revenue law. Anyone who imported, manufactured, sold or dispensed opium, coca leaves or their derivatives had to register with the collector of internal revenue and pay a special tax, and sales had to be made on official order forms.
In April 1919, months after the armistice ending the First World War, Nebraska enacted a statute forbidding any teacher in a private, parochial or public school to teach any subject in a language other than English, and forbidding instruction in foreign languages as such until a pupil had passed the eighth grade. Iowa, Ohio and other states passed similar measures.
In 1902, after the assassination of President McKinley by an avowed anarchist, New York made it a felony to advocate, by speech or writing, the doctrine that organized government should be overthrown by force, violence or any unlawful means. In June 1919 the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party held a national conference in New York City, and its National Council, of which Benjamin Gitlow was a member, issued a Left Wing Manifesto.
Charles O. Linder was a licensed physician in Spokane, Washington, registered under the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. In April 1922 he gave a woman named Ida Casey, whom he knew to be addicted to morphine and cocaine, one tablet of morphine and three of cocaine to take herself over a period of time.
On 7 November 1922 Oregon voters adopted by initiative a Compulsory Education Act requiring every parent or guardian of a child between eight and sixteen to send the child to a public school, with narrow exceptions, beginning in September 1926. The measure was promoted by the Scottish Rite Masons and supported by the Ku Klux Klan, and Walter M. Pierce, elected governor the same day, endorsed it.
This record concerns compulsory sterilization and is best read with a teacher's guidance. In March 1924 Virginia enacted a statute permitting the superintendents of certain state institutions to have inmates sterilized if, after a hearing, they were found to be afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity or what the law called imbecility.
In 1925 Minnesota enacted a Public Nuisance Law allowing a court to abate, as a public nuisance, any business of regularly publishing an obscene, lewd and lascivious or a malicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper or periodical. Truth published with good motives and for justifiable ends was a defense.
In June 1933, deep in the Depression, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Its first title authorized the President to approve codes of fair competition for trades and industries, usually drafted by trade associations, and made violation of an approved code a federal misdemeanor.
For decades American bonds and mortgages had commonly promised payment in gold coin of the present standard of weight and fineness, a clause designed to protect lenders if the paper dollar lost value. In the banking crisis of 1933 the Roosevelt administration took the country off the gold standard: it required the surrender of gold coin, forbade its export, and, by a joint resolution of Congress on 5 June 1933, declared gold clauses against public policy and made every such obligation dischargeable dollar for dollar in any legal tender.
The Social Security Act of 1935 created, among other programs, a national system of old-age benefits. Title VIII levied an excise on employers and an income tax on employees, both measured by wages and paid into the Treasury like other revenue.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, often called the Wagner Act after Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, guaranteed employees the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, defined unfair labor practices by employers, and created a National Labor Relations Board to enforce it. Congress grounded the act in its power over interstate commerce, finding that refusals to bargain led to strikes that obstructed the flow of goods.
Washington State's 1913 Minimum Wages for Women act declared that inadequate wages and unsanitary conditions harmed the health and morals of women and minors, and it created an Industrial Welfare Commission to fix wages sufficient for their decent maintenance. Elsie Parrish worked as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, owned by the West Coast Hotel Company.
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, decided on 3 June 1940, asked whether a Pennsylvania public school could expel children who refused, on religious grounds, to salute the American flag.
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, decided on 9 November 1942, tested how far the commerce power of Congress could reach into the fields of a single farm.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, decided on Flag Day, 14 June 1943, held that no state may compel public school pupils to salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance.
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, decided on 18 December 1944, upheld the criminal conviction of an American citizen for remaining in his home area after the Army ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry to leave it.
The W. J. Howey Company owned large citrus groves in Lake County, Florida, near a resort hotel it also operated. Each year it planted about five hundred acres, kept half and sold the rest to the public in narrow strips, explaining that the sales helped finance further planting.
A New Jersey statute authorized local school boards to arrange for the transportation of children to and from school, including private schools not operated for profit. The Board of Education of Ewing Township, which had no high schools of its own, adopted a resolution reimbursing parents for fares their children paid on regular public buses to attend public schools and Catholic parochial schools in nearby Trenton and Pennington.
In February 1946 Heman Marion Sweatt, a Houston mail carrier and a graduate of Wiley College, applied to the University of Texas Law School in Austin. The university's president, Theophilus S. Painter, refused him admission because state law reserved the university for white students, and at that time no law school in Texas admitted Black applicants.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, decided on 17 May 1954, held that state laws requiring or permitting separate public schools for black and white children deny the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
On 23 May 1957 three Cleveland police officers came to the home of Dollree Mapp looking for a man wanted for questioning about a bombing and for gambling slips. On her lawyer's advice she refused to let them in without a search warrant.
Tennessee's constitution required the General Assembly to reapportion its seats every ten years according to the number of qualified voters in each county. The legislature did so each decade from 1871 to 1901, then stopped.
In 1951 the New York State Board of Regents, which supervises the state's public schools, published a Statement on Moral and Spiritual Training that included a short prayer of twenty-two words: Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country. The Regents recommended it for daily use.
Section 11721 of California's Health and Safety Code made it a misdemeanor, punishable by at least ninety days in the county jail, for any person to use narcotics or to be addicted to their use. Lawrence Robinson was stopped on a Los Angeles street; two officers testified that they had seen marks on his arms and that he admitted occasional use.
A Pennsylvania statute required that at least ten verses of the Holy Bible be read, without comment, at the opening of each public school day. At Abington Senior High School, outside Philadelphia, the verses were broadcast over the public-address system each morning and followed by the Lord's Prayer, recited in unison.
In June 1961 someone broke into the Bay Harbor Poolroom in Panama City, Florida, and took coins from a cigarette machine and a jukebox. Clarence Earl Gideon, a fifty-one-year-old drifter with a record of earlier convictions, was charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit a misdemeanor, a felony under Florida law.
Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc., and its principal, Harry P. Schwarzmann, published a monthly investment newsletter, the Capital Gains Report, mailed to about five thousand subscribers at eighteen dollars a year. Between March and November 1960, on six occasions, the firm bought shares of a stock shortly before recommending it in the Report for long-term investment.
On 29 March 1960 the New York Times printed a full-page advertisement titled Heed Their Rising Voices. Paid for by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, it described student demonstrations, accused unnamed Southern violators of meeting Dr. King's peaceful protests with intimidation, and asked for money.
Because it concerns contraception and marriage, the case is best studied with a teacher's guidance. Since 1879 Connecticut law had made it a crime for any person to use a drug or device to prevent conception, and a general accessory statute allowed anyone who assisted or counseled such use to be punished as a principal.
On 13 March 1963 Phoenix police arrested Ernesto Miranda at his home in connection with a kidnapping and sexual assault. After the victim identified him, two officers questioned him in Interrogation Room No. 2 for about two hours.
In December 1965 a group of adults and students met at Christopher Eckhardt's home in Des Moines, Iowa, and decided to show their objection to the fighting in Vietnam and support for a truce by wearing black armbands over the holidays and fasting on 16 December and New Year's Eve. The principals of the Des Moines schools learned of the plan and on 14 December adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband would be asked to remove it and suspended if he refused.
By the late 1960s Catholic parochial schools educated a large share of children in states such as Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and rising lay-teacher salaries strained their budgets. Pennsylvania's Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968 authorized the state to purchase secular educational services from private schools, reimbursing teachers' salaries, textbooks and materials for courses in mathematics, modern foreign languages, physical science and physical education, with state approval of materials and audited accounts.
Roe v. Wade came to the Court from Texas, where statutes dating in substance from 1857 made it a crime to procure an abortion except on medical advice to save the mother's life.
Texas financed its public schools through a Minimum Foundation Program that combined state money with a required local share, and allowed each district to raise more by taxing property within its borders. Because property values differed widely, so did spending.
United States v. Nixon, decided on 24 July 1974, resolved a confrontation between President Richard Nixon and the federal courts that grew out of the Watergate affair, the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices and the efforts that followed to conceal it.
In January 1957 Kenneth Donaldson was committed to the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee after his father sought a hearing before a Pinellas County judge, who found him mentally ill. He remained there against his will for nearly fifteen years.
Ernst & Ernst, an accounting firm, audited First Securities Company of Chicago, a small brokerage house, from 1946 through 1967 and prepared the annual reports the firm filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Leston B. Nay, the brokerage's president and owner of 92 percent of its stock, persuaded certain customers to put money into special escrow accounts that he said would pay a high return.
Frank O'Neal Addington had been hospitalized in Texas state mental hospitals many times between 1969 and 1975. In December 1975, after he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of assault by threat against his mother, she petitioned for his indefinite commitment.
Mortgage Trust of America was a real estate investment trust advised by Transamerica Mortgage Advisors, Inc., known as TAMA, a subsidiary of the Transamerica Corporation. A shareholder of the trust sued in federal court, both derivatively on the trust's behalf and for a class of shareholders, naming the trust, several trustees, TAMA, Transamerica and another affiliate, Land Capital, Inc.
The petitioner, Aaron, was a managerial employee of E. L. Aaron & Co., a New York broker-dealer that made a market in the stock of Lawn-A-Mat Chemical & Equipment Corp., a seller of lawn-care franchises. He supervised the firm's salesmen and kept its due diligence files.
Vincent Chiarella worked as a markup man in the New York composing room of Pandick Press, a financial printer. In 1975 and 1976 he handled five announcements of corporate takeover bids.
In 1972 Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a microbiologist working for the General Electric Company, applied for a patent on a bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas into which he had introduced plasmids, hereditary units outside the chromosome, that allowed it to break down several components of crude oil. No natural bacterium had this combined capacity.
In May 1975 the Texas Legislature amended Section 21.031 of its Education Code to withhold state funds for educating children who had not been legally admitted to the United States and to allow local districts to deny them enrollment. In 1977 the Tyler Independent School District in Smith County began charging such children tuition.
Nicholas Romeo, a man with a profound intellectual disability who could not speak and needed help with the most basic tasks, lived with his parents in Philadelphia until his father died in May 1974. His mother, unable to care for him or to manage his outbursts, asked a county court to admit him to a state facility, and in June 1974 he was committed to the Pennsylvania institution known as Pennhurst State School and Hospital.
In March 1973 Raymond Dirks, an officer of a New York broker-dealer who analyzed insurance company securities for institutional investors, received a call from Ronald Secrist, a former officer of Equity Funding Corporation of America. Secrist said that the company's assets were vastly overstated through fraud, that regulators had ignored similar warnings, and that Dirks should verify the charges and make them public.
Christopher Lowe was president and principal shareholder of Lowe Management Corporation, a registered investment adviser from 1974 to 1981. During those years he was convicted of misappropriating a client's funds, acting as an adviser without registering in New York, tampering with evidence to cover up a fraud on a client, and stealing from a bank.
From 1980 to 1982 Eugene and Julia McMahon, for themselves and as trustees of pension and profit-sharing plans, held accounts with the brokerage firm Shearson/American Express Inc. Julia McMahon signed two customer agreements providing that any controversy over the accounts would be settled by arbitration.
Basic Incorporated, a maker of chemical refractories for the steel industry, had long attracted the interest of Combustion Engineering, Inc. Beginning in September 1976, Combustion's representatives met and spoke with Basic's officers and directors about a possible merger.
On the night of 11 January 1983 Nancy Beth Cruzan, a young Missouri woman, lost control of her car on a county road in Jasper County. Paramedics restored her breathing and heartbeat, but she never regained consciousness, and the trial court later found her to be in a persistent vegetative state, kept alive by a surgically implanted feeding tube in a state hospital.
The Farmers Cooperative of Arkansas and Oklahoma, an agricultural cooperative with about 23,000 members, raised money for its general operations by selling promissory notes payable on demand. The notes were uncollateralized and uninsured but paid a variable interest rate set monthly to stay above what local banks paid.
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey tested five provisions of Pennsylvania's Abortion Control Act of 1982, as amended in 1988 and 1989.
James Herman O'Hagan was a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney. In July 1988 the London company Grand Metropolitan PLC retained the firm as local counsel for a possible tender offer for the Pillsbury Company.
Washington had made it a crime to aid a suicide since its first territorial legislature acted in 1854. In January 1994 four physicians who treat terminally ill patients, led by Dr. Harold Glucksberg, joined three gravely ill patients (who died while the case was pending) and the nonprofit group Compassion in Dying in a suit in federal court.
The two respondents, identified in the case as L. C. and E. W., were Georgia women with intellectual disabilities who also had psychiatric diagnoses, schizophrenia in one case and a personality disorder in the other. Both were voluntarily admitted to Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta.
In 1995 a federal court placed the Cleveland City School District, which enrolled more than 75,000 mostly low-income children, under state control after findings of a crisis of magnitude; the district had met none of eighteen state performance standards. Ohio responded with several programs, including community (charter) schools, magnet schools and a Pilot Project Scholarship Program.
Charles Edwards was chairman, chief executive and sole shareholder of ETS Payphones, Inc. Through independent distributors ETS sold payphones to the public for about $7,000 each, packaged with a site lease, a five-year leaseback and management agreement, and a promise to buy the phone back at full price at the end of the lease or within 180 days of a request.
In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, which exempted from state prosecution seriously ill patients and their caregivers who possessed or grew marijuana for medical use on a physician's recommendation. Angel Raich and Diane Monson, two California residents with serious medical conditions, used marijuana on the advice of their doctors.
In the 1990s scientists at Myriad Genetics, a Salt Lake City company, determined the location and nucleotide sequence of two human genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes greatly raise a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and knowledge of the sequences allowed Myriad to build tests that detect those mutations.
Obergefell v. Hodges, decided on 26 June 2015, asked whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex, and to recognize such a marriage lawfully performed in another state.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization arose from Mississippi's Gestational Age Act of 2018, which generally prohibited abortion after the fifteenth week of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormality.
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