1803 Marbury vs. Madison [see above, p. 187]. Marshall claimed for the Court the right of judicial review—the power of the Supreme Court to nullify federal laws found to be in conflict with the Constitution. In so doing he made a large move in the direction of achieving co-equal status for the court, which until then had been anything but. (Jefferson would have preferred to keep it that way.)
1810 Fletcher v. Peck
Fletcher was the first case in which a state statute was held void under the United States Constitution. The case originated in a 1795 action of the Georgia legislature, which in 1795 was bribed into granting public lands to four groups of purchasers known collectively as the Yazoo Land Companies. That land comprised much of what are now the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Popular indignation forced the legislature in 1796 to rescind the grant, on the ground that it had been secured by fraud. By that time, however, some of the land had been purchased by innocent third parties in New England and other parts of the country. Those buyers contested the validity of the rescinding act, contending that the original grant could not be repealed without violating the Contract Clause in Article I, Section 10/ No State shall pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.
Marshall's decision declared that a public land grant issued by a state qualified as a contract. According to the Constitution, that contract could not be abrogated without fair compensation to the buyers. Marshall's ruling meant that cancellation of the purchase agreement was an unconstitutional impairment of the obligations of contract.
The decision was important for the protection of the vested rights of private property and extended the purview of the Contract Clause to public as well as private contracts. The decision made the clause applicable to transactions to which the state itself was a party. Speaking for a unanimous Court, Marshall wrote: "Is a clause to be considered as inhibiting the State from impairing the obligation of contracts between two individuals, but as excluding from that inhibition contracts made with itself? The words themselves contain no such distinction. They are general, and are applicable to contracts of every description."
1819 Dartmouth College v. Woodward
The Dartmouth College case arose from a dispute between the legislature of New Hampshire and the Trustees of Dartmouth College. Dartmouth College was incorporated by a royal charter in 1769, which established a permanent Board of Trustees. In 1816 Republicans gained control of the legislature and changed the Dartmouth charter, increasing the number of trustees and placing the Board of Trustees under the control of the governor. The trustees sued, claiming that the United States Constitution contract clause rendered the state action invalid. When the college lost its case in the New Hampshire state courts, Daniel Webster brought the case to the Supreme Court. Webster's eloquent plea for the college brought tears even to the eyes of Justice Marshall.
John Marshall decided the case, however, solely on the issue of the contract clause. He declared that the charter which created a college was a contract that had created a corporation. In so doing he defined a corporation as "an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law." The corporation, he went on, possesses properties of "immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual." In other words, a corporation is a permanent legal creation which has essentially the same rights as an individual. Again citing Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution, he claimed that a contract was "beyond legislative control."
The significance of the sanctity of contracts and the definition of a corporation for the furtherance of business enterprises cannot be overstated. Marshall's decision repeatedly strengthened the economic landscape for the development of capitalism.
1819 McCulloch v. Maryland
The case of McCulloch v. Maryland involved the Second Bank of the United States and addressed the issues of national supremacy and implied powers in the Constitution. Opponents of the Bank of the United States sought state support to oppose the bank, and the Maryland legislature passed a law placing an annual tax of $15,000 on the bank. James McCulloch, the cashier of the Baltimore branch of the Bank, refused to pay the tax.
Marshall first attacked the question of whether or not the federal government had the right to create a national bank. Following the same line of argument as that used by Alexander Hamilton when the first bank was created, Marshall affirmed the right of the federal government to create a bank under the doctrine of implied powers. Marshall argued that the national government was "supreme within its sphere of action." He believed that the Constitution should not be read as a detailed blueprint, but a matter of general powers. Marshall wrote that although the word "bank" does not appear in the Constitution:
[W]e find great powers to lay and collect borrow money; to regulate commerce; to declare and conduct a war; and to raise Support armies and navies. _ But it may with great reason be contended that government, entrusted with such ample powers, on the due execution of which the happiness and prosperity of the nation vitally depends, must also be entrusted with ample means for their execution. The power being given, it is the interest of the nation to facilitate its execution. It can never be their interest, and cannot be presumed to have been their intention, to clog and embarrass its execution by withholding the most appropriate means.
Common sense required that necessary had to be understood in the sense of "convenient" or "conducive" to the business of government, rather than absolutely necessary. Once concluding that the federal government had the right to pass a law creating a corporation, namely, the National Bank, Marshall stated what to him was obvious: the power to tax is the power to destroy. If the state of Maryland could pass a law that could tax the National Bank, it could tax it out of existence. The net effect would be to nullify a federal law. But, said Marshall, federal law overrules state law and thus the Maryland law was unconstitutional. He wrote:
That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create; that there is a plain repugnance in conferring on one government a power to control the constitutional measures of another, which other, with respect to those very measures, is declared to be supreme over that which exerts the control, are propositions not to be denied. _
That the power of taxing [the bank] by the states, may be exercised so as to destroy it is too obvious to be denied.
1824 Gibbons vs. Ogden
Gibbons v. Ogden is the steamboat case. New York state had awarded to Aaron Ogden a monopoly right to operate a steamboat ferry between New York and New Jersey. Thomas
Gibbons operated a rival steamboat line and claimed the New York did not have the power to give Ogden an exclusive right. Examining the language of the Constitutional commerce clause Marshall argued that steamboats fell under the idea of commerce and that the federal government had the exclusive right to regulate interstate commerce. New York's granting of a monopoly conflicted with federal powers.
The net result of the aforementioned cases is that Marshall established firmly that the Constitution was the supreme law of the land. All federal laws must conform to the Constitution or they shall be declared null and void. Likewise, state laws must conform to the Constitution. If state laws could nullify federal laws, then federal laws would be form without substance; state laws must not conflict with or contradict federal laws. In addition, where the Constitution gives powers over certain enterprises to the federal government, states may not usurp that power. In the struggle over states' rights that eventually led to secession, that principle would be challenged again and again, but Marshall's view eventually prevailed.49
In subsequent cases such as Sturges v. Crowninshield and Cohens v. Virginia Marshall continued to argue that state laws absolving debtors of their obligations were an impairment of contractual obligations. He also determined state court decisions were subject to review by the Supreme Court when constitutional issues were involved. In all, John Marshall wrote well over 500 decisions during his tenure, and the great majority were unanimous.