Herbert A. Johnson

A Chief Justice's Progress: John Marshall from Revolutionary Virginia to the Supreme Court

Prologue: Appointment Childhood in the Frontier Gentry, 1755-1774 The Revolutionary War Experience, 1774-1781 Lawyer and Lawmaker in the Old Dominion, 1781-1787 Virginia Nationalist, 1787-1791 Southern Federalist (I), 1791-1797 Diplomatic Interlude: The XYZ Mission, 1797-1798 Southern Federalist (II), 1798-1801 Chief Justice, 1801-1835 Bibliography

John Marshall: Definer of a Nation and The Chief Justiceship of John Marshall 1801–1835

A portrait of the US Supreme Courts activities and accomplishments under the Chief Justiceship of John Marshall. The Marshall Court established the supremacy of the federal government in areas of national concern and shaped the structure of federalism in the US before the Civil War.

Some Nice Sharp Quillets of the Customs Law: The New York Affair, 1763-1767

S TAITUTES, like men and women, grow palsied when they age; few retain the same capabilities in their centennial year that they possessed in youth. By I763 the old Acts of Trade and Navigation, tailored to meet the vastly different imperial conditions of the previous century, had become ineffective controls upon commercial activity and contained inadequate procedures for enforcement and administration. Predicated upon the acts of the Restoration Parliaments in i66o and i663, they had been slightly supplemented by the i696 legislation under William III, but for the most part the British Empire entered the second half of the eighteenth century with its mercantile system a ramshackle and archaic product of seventeenth-century law makers. The lawyers of the North American colonies were well aware of the disheveled state of the British Acts of Trade, and lost no opportunity to make new breaches in the system of enforcement. In this they were aided by ambiguities that existed in the terms of the statutes themselves, and the anachronisms that evolved through applying old law to new situations. Even before Parliamentary revisions were made in the administration of colonial customs by the Sugar Act of I764, British courts had begun to grapple with the problem of how the antiquated rules of enforcement could be reinterpreted in the light of changing colonial conditions. One such attempt at judicial reformation and tightening of pre-existing practices is to be found in the New York affair, a series of related cases that originated in the province of New York. The conclusion of this complex and costly litigation, which was far from a clear definition of the law, indicated the limitations upon judicial power and discretion in meeting the challenge. On Friday, December 2, I763, the merchant ship New York, bound