Major Supreme Court Cases In History example essay topic

The major supreme court cases in the nineteenth century main focus was on enforcing the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. Whether the right was to freedom, voting, jobs, taxes, or property. The ideas that were behind the civil war were planted in the minds of many women and people of color through out this time period, thus producing many of the court cases that are talked about daily in many houses across the US. Almost all the questions presented in the major cases in U.S. history can be divided into three sub categories; discrimination (race / sex ), money, and the power of individual states governments.

States are prohibited from violating the civil rights of its citizens by the fourteenth amendment. The Cherokee Nation (a native American tribe) took the state of Georgia to court in 1831 because Georgia enacted legislation suspending the Cherokee's government, annexing the lands, and thereby making the people in the nation "outlaws". The question the Cherokees brought forth was weather or not the US could extend jurisdiction over Indians. This case was followed and answered by Worcester vs. Georgia, which stated that the US could not. Then in 1856-1857, Dred Scott sued unsuccessfully in the Missouri courts for his freedom.

Scott was a slave in Missouri who was taken to live in Illinois (a free state) and then returned to Missouri. Scott's defense was that a slaves residence in free territory would make the slave a free man. Was Dred Scott free or a slave? The courts ruling was that yes, Scott was a slave. Only a citizen could be free and only congress can grant citizenship which it had not done for Scott therefore meaning was never free. The court then held the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, hoping to put an end to the slavery question once and for all.

Virginia Minor attempted to register to vote, as guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment, but the register would not allow her to the result was a lawsuit filed against the registrar, Happersett. In 1875 the case went to the Supreme Court as a test of women's fourteenth amendment rights granted to citizens. The court rejected the argument that voting was a right of citizenship. However, the decision confirms the need for a new constitutional amendment.

The court upheld the right of individual states to give women the right to vote within their own borders. As a result of the Minor vs. Happersett lawsuit, suffragist women tried to get states to grant women the right to vote. Finally in 1920, the nineteenth amendment became ratified. Another prime example would be the Slaughterhouse cases (1873), the Supreme Court contradicted the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment by decreeing that most citizenship rights remained under state, not federal, control.

Another popular reason that lawsuits are filled are because of money. The most famous case of this time was Marbury vs. Madison (1803). The case began when Marbury was designated as a justice of the peace in the District of Columbia in the last days of John Adam's presidency, but was never fully finalized. The appointee invoked an act of Congress and sued for the job in the Supreme Court. The questions presented were: Is Marbury entitled to his appointment? Is his lawsuit the correct way to get it?

The answers are yes and yes. A second case is Fletcher vs. Peck, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1810, involving the Yazoo land fraud. The court ruled that an act of the Georgia legislature concerning a land grant was unconstitutional because it revoked rights previously granted by contract. The decision was the first to declare a state legislative act unconstitutional. In 1876, Munn vs. Illinois was brought to the supreme court. Munn, a partner in a Chicago warehouse firm, had been found guilty by an Illinois court of violating the state laws providing for the fixing of maximum charges for storage of grain.

Munn appealed, stating that the fixing of maximum rates constituted a taking of property without due process of law. The Supreme Court upheld the Granger laws, establishing as constitutional the principle of public regulation of private businesses involved in serving the public interest. The third reason for lawsuits is questioning the powers of the state government. In McCulloch vs. Maryland (1819), Congress chartered The Second Bank of the United States (happened in 1816). In 1818, the state of Maryland passed legislation to impose taxes on the bank. McCulloch, the cashier of the Baltimore branch of the bank, refused to pay the tax.

This case presented two questions: Did Congress have the authority to establish the bank? Did the Maryland law unconstitutionally interfere with congressional powers? In what was an unanimous decision, the court held that Congress had the power to incorporate the bank and that Maryland could not tax instruments of the national government employed in the execution of constitutional powers. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Marshall noted that Congress possessed unremunerated powers not explicitly outlined in the Constitution. Marshall also held that while the states retained the power of taxation, "the constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are supreme... they control the constitution and laws of the respective states, and cannot be controlled by them".

The case of Dartmouth vs. Woodward also focused on states power and established that a state could not alter a charter. A third example is that of United States vs. Cruikshank (1876). The court overturned the convictions of some of those responsible for the Colfax Massacre, ruling that the Enforcement Act applied only to violations of black rights by states, not individuals. Discrimination, money, and the power of state government are the three categories that most major Supreme Court cases in history can be divided into, (Although many may fall into one, two, or all three sections). The reasons many of these people went to court were the same ideas that was behind the civil war. The questions that were brought to the court may still be unanswered.