EXTENT AND APPLICATION OF THE SUPREME COURT'S POW

EXTENT AND APPLICATION OF THE SUPREME COURT'S POWER (1850-1875)

This research paper summarizes and analyzes the approach taken by the American Supreme Court between 1850 and 1875 in its jurisprudence concerning the extent and application of its power.

During the last 14 years (1850-1864) when Roger Taney was Chief Justice, (1836-1864), the Court was largely preoccupied with the allocation of power between national and state governments. The Taney Court permitted more scope for the exercise of state power over commerce than did the Court of Chief Justice John Marshall (1801-1836), without rolling back the expansion of federal constitutional power pioneered by its predecessor. Although it sometimes exercised judicial self-restraint, the Taney Court overreached itself and damaged the standing of the Court by its sweeping but misguided assertion of federal power in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.

The Court under Chief Justice Salmon Chase (1864-1873) generally accommodated itself to the tremendous expansion of federal power resulting from the Civil War and acquiesced, with some exceptions, in the wartime actions of the presidency and Congress's reconstruction laws. The Chase Court and the early Court under Chief Justice Morrison Waite (1874-1888) maintained a laissez faire and even protective approach toward the private sector. Apart from the Dred Scott decision, the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court in the third quarter of the 19th century was in keeping with the tempe

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unconstitutional; and (3) Scott was not free because Missouri law, which upheld slavery, applied. The Dred Scott decision created an uproar in the North, owing to its content, but also because, as Schwartz pointed out, "the majority of the Justices were from below the Mason-Dixon line." McCloskey said that "far from extinguishing the slavery controversy, they had fanned its flames and had, moreover, deeply endangered the security of the judicial arm of government." When President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ordered the arrest and trial before a military tribunal of secessionist John Merryman in early 1861, Taney, then on circuit as Federal District Judge in Maryland, ordered his release and called on Lincoln to perform his constitutional duty. Lincoln ignored Taney's order. Taney died in 1864. Pusillanimity of the Chase Court During the Civil War, the Supreme Court chose not to oppose the flagrant violations of civil liberties authorized by Lincoln to cope with the wartime emergency. Edmund Burke said in the late 18th century: "laws are commanded to hold their tongues amongst arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold." The decision of the Court in

Category: Government - E