Barron v. Baltimore

Summary

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. Barron sued the mayor and city council and won a verdict of $4,500 in Baltimore County Court, but the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed. He brought the case to the Supreme Court by writ of error under Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789. The question was whether the clause of the Fifth Amendment forbidding the taking of private property for public use without just compensation restrains the states and their cities as well as the federal government. Barron's side argued that the amendment was written in favor of the liberty of the citizen, that its words name no particular government, and that some prohibitions in the original Constitution, such as those in Article I, Section 10, already bound the states. The city answered that the Bill of Rights was drafted to limit the new national government, and that the people of each state had their own constitutions to protect them against their own legislatures. On 16 February 1833 a unanimous Court dismissed the writ for want of jurisdiction. Chief Justice Marshall reasoned that the Constitution was ordained by the people of the United States for the government they were creating, so that limitations expressed in general terms apply to that government. He compared Article I, Section 9, whose restrictions apply only to Congress though phrased broadly, with Section 10, which names the states expressly whenever it restrains them. Had the framers of the amendments meant to bind the states, they would have said so in the same direct way. Marshall added a historical argument: the ratifying conventions called for amendments out of fear of the new central power, not of the state governments, and a state dissatisfied with its own constitution could amend it far more easily than by the national process of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states. The library text contains Marshall's opinion of the Court and the formal judgment; Wikisource page notes have been stripped. Counsel's arguments are not reproduced. Barron settled the question for a generation. After the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, litigants argued that its Due Process and Privileges or Immunities Clauses reached the states. In Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Co. v. Chicago (1897) the Court held that due process requires just compensation when a state takes property, and through the twentieth century, beginning with cases such as Gitlow v. New York (1925), it applied most Bill of Rights guarantees to the states one by one, a process known as selective incorporation. Barron's reading of the original Bill of Rights itself has not been overruled.

Top Lessons

• Reading a word in light of its neighbors

  Marshall's strongest argument is structural. By setting the general words of Article I, Section 9 beside the explicit 'No State shall' of Section 10, he shows that the Constitution names the states whenever it restrains them, and he reads the Fifth Amendment by that pattern.

• Two layers of protection

  In 1833 Americans lived under two constitutions, state and federal. Marshall assumes that each people guards against its own government through its own charter, which places responsibility for state abuses on the citizens of that state.

• History as evidence of meaning

  The opinion appeals to what everyone in 1833 remembered: the amendments were demanded by those who feared the new national government. Marshall treats that shared memory of ratification as proof of what the words were meant to do.

• A small wharf and a large principle

  Barron's loss was concrete and local, but the Court decided it by asking which government the Bill of Rights restrains. A dispute about mud in a harbor became the leading statement of the federal structure of rights for thirty-five years.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Barron concerns a harbor silted by municipal street works and the reach of the takings clause; the opinion contains no medical material.