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.
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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.
Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v.
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.
Wisconsin v. Yoder, decided on 15 May 1972, asked whether a state may compel Amish parents to keep their children in school after the eighth grade.
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.
In February 1969 National Industries, Inc. bought 34 percent of the voting stock of TSC Industries, Inc.
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.
District of Columbia v. Heller, decided on 26 June 2008, was the Court's first full examination of the meaning of the Second Amendment.
In March 2010 Congress passed and President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Two provisions drew constitutional challenge.
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.