1. McCulloch vs. Maryland
1.1. Maryland enacted a statute imposing a tax on all banks operating in Maryland not chartered by the state. The statute provided that all such banks were prohibited from issuing bank notes except upon stamped paper issued by the state. The statute set forth the fees to be paid for the paper and established penalties for violations.
1.1.1. The Second Bank of the United States was established pursuant to an 1816 act of Congress. McCulloch , the cashier of the Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States, issued bank notes without complying with the Maryland law. Maryland sued McCulloch for failing to pay the taxes due under the Maryland statute and McCulloch contested the constitutionality of that act. The state court found for Maryland and McCulloch appealed.
2. Dartmouth College vs. Woodward
2.1. In 1769 the King of England granted a charter to Dartmouth College. This document spelled out the purpose of the school, set up the structure to govern it, and gave land to the college. In 1816, the state legislature of New Hampshire passed laws that revised the charter. These laws changed the school from private to public. They changed the duties of the trustees. They changed how the trustees were selected.
2.1.1. The existing trustees filed suit. They claimed that the legislature violated the Constitution. They said that Article 1, Section 10, of the Constitution prevented a state from "impairing" (that is, weakening or canceling) a contract.
2.1.1.1. By a 5-1 margin, the Court agreed with Dartmouth. The Court struck down the law, so Dartmouth continued as a private college. Chief Justice Marshall wrote the majority opinion. He said that the charter was, in essence, a contract between the King and the trustees. Even though we were no longer a royal colony, the contract is still valid because the Constitution says that a state cannot pass laws to impair a contract.
3. Gibbons vs. Odgen
3.1. New York granted Robert R. Livingston and Robert Fulton the exclusive right of steam boat navigation on New York state waters. Livingston assigned to Ogden the right to navigate the waters between New York City and certain ports in New Jersey.
3.1.1. Ogden brought this lawsuit seeking an injunction to restrain Gibbons from operating steam ships on New York waters in violation of his exclusive privilege. Ogden was granted the injunction and Gibbons appealed, asserting that his steamships were licensed under the Act of Congress entitled “An act for enrolling and licensing ships and vessels to be employed in the coasting trade and fisheries, and for regulating the same.” Gibbons asserted that the Act of Congress superseded the exclusive privilege granted by the state of New York.
4. Dred Scott vs. Sandford
4.1. Dred Scott was a slave living in the slave state of Missouri. His owner took him to Illinois and then to Minnesota, which were both free states under the Missouri Compromise. Plaintiff and his owner returned to Missouri, and Plaintiff was sold to Sanford. Plaintiff sued Defendant for his freedom, claiming to be a citizen of Missouri, based on having obtained freedom by domicile for a long period in a free state.
4.1.1. A slave sought his freedom under the Missouri Compromise. Slaves are not citizens under the United States Constitution.
5. Plessy vs. Ferguson
5.1. In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed a law (the Separate Car Act) that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, a group of prominent black, creole, and white New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) dedicated to repeal the law
5.1.1. In a 7 to 1 decision handed down on May 18, 1896 the Court rejected Plessy's arguments based on the Fourteenth Amendment, seeing no way in which the Louisiana statute violated it. In addition, the majority of the Court rejected the view that the Louisiana law implied any inferiority of blacks, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, it contended that the law separated the two races as a matter of public policy.
6. United states vs. E.C. Knight Co.
6.1. In 1890, the United States Congress enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act, an attempt to curb concentrations of economic power that significantly reduced competition between businesses. One of its two main provisions outlawed all trade combinations or agreements that severely restricted trade between states or with foreign powers. The second outlawed any attempts to monopolize trade within the United States. When the American Sugar Refining Company acquired almost all of the sugar-producing capacity in the U.S., the government sought to divest it of its monopoly.
6.2. In 1892, the American Sugar Refining Company gained control of the E. C. Knight Company and several others which resulted in a 98% monopoly of the American sugar refining industry. President Grover Cleveland directed the national government to sue the Knight Company under the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act to prevent the acquisition.
6.3. The court's 8-1 decision, handed down on January 21, 1895 and written by Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller, went against the government.
7. Debs vs. United States
7.1. On June 16, 1918 Debs made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting US involvement in World War I. He was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917 and convicted, sentenced to serve ten years in prison and to be disfranchised for life.
7.2. The case against Debs was based on a document entitled Anti-War Proclamation and Program, showing that Debs' original intent was to openly protest against the war. The argument of the Federal Government was that Debs was attempting to arouse mutiny and treason by preventing the drafting of soldiers into the United States Army.This type of speech was outlawed in the United States with the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917. The defense argued that Debs was entitled to the rights of free speech provided for in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights. This was one of three cases decided in 1919 in which the Court had upheld convictions that restricted free speech.
7.3. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the Court examined several statements that Debs had made regarding the war. While he had tempered his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act, the Court found he had shown the "intention and effect of obstructing the draft and recruitment for the war." Debs went to prison on April 13, 1919. While in prison in Oregon, he ran for president in the 1920 Election for the fifth and final time, despite his disfranchisement. He received 919,799 votes, the most ever for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the U.S.
8. Schechter Poultry Corp. vs. United States
8.1. The government claimed the Schechters sold sick poultry, There were originally sixty charges against Schechter Poultry, which were reduced to eighteen charges plus charges of conspiracy by the time the case was heard by the U. S. Supreme Court.
8.2. The Court distinguished between direct effects on interstate commerce, which Congress could lawfully regulate, and indirect, which were purely matters of state law. Though the raising and sale of poultry was an interstate industry, the Court found that the "stream of interstate commerce" had stopped in this case—Schechter's slaughterhouses chickens were sold exclusively to intrastate buyers. Any interstate effect of Schechter was indirect, and therefore beyond federal reach.
9. Lochner vs. New york
9.1. In 1899, Joseph Lochner, owner of Lochner's Home Bakery in Utica, was indicted on a charge that he violated the Section 110 of Article 8, Chapter 415, of the Laws of 1897, in that he wrongfully and unlawfully permitted an employee working for him to work more than sixty hours in one week. Lochner was fined $25. For a second offense in 1901, Lochner drew a fine of $50 from the Oneida County Court.
9.2. Lochner's appeal was based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides: "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." In a series of cases starting with Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court established that the Due Process Clause is not merely a procedural guarantee, but also a substantive limitation on the type of control the government may exercise over individuals.
9.3. The Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–4, ruled that the law limiting bakers' working hours did not constitute a legitimate exercise of state police powers.
10. Schenck vs United States
10.1. The first in a line of Supreme Court Cases defining the modern understanding of the First Amendment. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the often-cited opinion in the case, because of events that were not publicly known at the time.
10.2. A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense. The First Amendment did not alter the well established law in cases where the attempt was made through expressions that would be protected in other circumstances.
11. Roe vs. Wade
11.1. In June 1969, Norma L. McCorvey discovered she was pregnant with her third child. She returned to Dallas, Texas, where friends advised her to assert falsely that she had been raped in order to obtain a legal abortion (with the understanding that Texas law allowed abortion in cases of rape and incest). However, this scheme failed because there was no police report documenting the alleged rape. She attempted to obtain an illegal abortion, but found the unauthorized site had been closed down by the police. Eventually, she was referred to attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington. McCorvey would give birth before the case was decided.)
11.2. the Court ruled 7–2 that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests in regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting women's health. Arguing that these state interests became stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the trimester of pregnancy.
12. Brown vs. board of Education
12.1. For much of the sixty years before the Brown case, race relations in the U.S. had been dominated by racial segregation. This policy had been endorsed in 1896 by the United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. In But in 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas.
12.2. The named plaintiff, Oliver L. Brown, an African American. His daughter Linda, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.
12.3. After much debate, the Board of Education of Topeka began to end segregation in the Topeka elementary schools in August 1953, integrating two attendance districts. All the Topeka elementary schools were changed to neighborhood attendance centers in January 1956.
13. Marbury vs. Madison
13.1. President John Adams named forty-two justices of the peace and sixteen new circuit court justices for the District of Columbia under the Organic Act. The Organic Act was an attempt by the Federalists to take control of the federal judiciary before Thomas Jefferson took office.
13.1.1. The commissions were signed by President Adams and sealed by acting Secretary of State John Marshall but they were not delivered before the expiration of Adams’s term as president. Thomas Jefferson refused to honor the commissions, claiming that they were invalid because they had not been delivered by the end of Adams’s term.
13.1.1.1. William Marbury was an intended recipient of an appointment as justice of the peace. Marbury applied directly to the Supreme Court of the United States for a writ of mandamus to compel Jefferson’s Secretary of State, James Madison, to deliver the commissions. The Judiciary Act of 1789 had granted the Supreme Court original jurisdiction to issue writs of mandamus “…to any courts appointed, or persons holding office, under the authority of the United States.”
14. Fletcher vs. Peck
14.1. In 1795, nearly every member of the Georgia state legislature was bribed to permit the sale of 30 million acres of land at less than two cents per acre for a total of $500,000. Only one member of the legislature voted against the legislation. The land was known as the Yazoo lands and eventually became the states of Alabama and Mississippi.
14.1.1. As a result of public outrage, most of the legislators lost the following election and the new legislature passed a statute in 1796 essentially nullifying the transactions. Those who had purchased the land refused to accept the return of their purchase price and much of the land was resold to bona fide purchasers at great profit.
14.1.1.1. Robert Fletcher purchased 15,000 acres from John Peck in 1803 for $3,000. Peck, in spite of the 1796 statute, had placed a covenant in the deed that stated that the title to the land had not been constitutionally impaired by any subsequent act of the state of Georgia. Fletcher sued Peck to establish the constitutionality of the 1796 act; either the act was constitutional and the contract was void, or the act was unconstitutional and Fletcher had clear title to the land.