The American JudiciaryBaldwin, Simeon E. (Simeon Eben)
History
The American Judiciary
Baldwin, Simeon E. (Simeon Eben)
Courts -- United States; Law -- United States -- History
Four years later the Mayor's Court of New York, in the case of
Rutgers _v._ Waddington, held that an act of the legislature
of that State, if given the effect which it was plainly intended
to secure, would be contrary to the Constitution of the State,
and therefore allowed it so limited an operation as virtually to
annul it. The legislature retorted by resolutions of
censure.[Footnote: Hunt, "Life of Edward Livingston," 49-51.]
What was probably the second instance of the actual use of the
power in question arose in 1786, out of a statute of Rhode Island
passed to support the credit of her paper money of that year's
issue. Any one declining to receive it in payment for goods sold
at par was to be liable to a _qui tum_ action, to be tried
without a jury. Counsel for a man sued in such a proceeding put
in a plea that the act was unconstitutional and so
void.[Footnote: Trevett _v._ Weeden. See Coxe, "Judicial
Power and Unconstitutional Legislation," 234, 237.] The court,
which was composed of five judges, threw out the action on this
ground, treating the charter from Charles II and the long usage
under it as having established trial by jury as a fundamental and
indefeasible right. The General Assembly shortly afterward
summoned the judges before it to account for this judgment. They
appeared and stated their reasons for their conclusion,
protesting also against the adoption of any resolution for their
removal from office (which had been suggested) until after a
formal trial. They were not impeached, but at the ensuing
session, their terms of office having expired, the Assembly chose
others in their place.
Not far from the same time the Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts pronounced a statute unconstitutional, but there
the legislature displayed no feeling, and at the next session
unanimously repealed it.[Footnote: This, no doubt, was one of the
instances of the exercise of this power referred to by Elbridge
Gerry in the Federal Convention of 1787. Elliot's Debates, V,
151. It is described in Proceedings Massachusetts Historical
Society, XVII, 507.]
In 1808, Judge Calvin Pease of the Ohio Circuit Court was
impeached for holding a law of Ohio unconstitutional. He avowed
the act, and insisted that as it was a judicial one the soundness
or unsoundness of his conclusions could not be inquired into as a
ground of impeachment. The result was an acquittal.[Footnote:
Foster, "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,"
I, 691.]
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