Diminishing the Bill of Rights

The major decisions of the Supreme Court during the tenure of Chief Justice John Marshall (1801–1835) remain of enduring interest and not just to legal historians and students of constitutional law, despite the vast historical literature already devoted to them. William Davenport Mercer makes a good case that Barron v. Baltimore (1833) is one of the least understood. His painstaking research supports a lively (though sometimes-repetitive) narrative and adds significant new details to what is generally known about the case. The lives of John Barron and John Craig were ruined when the city of Baltimore adopted an improvement scheme that diverted silt into the harbor, destroying the commercial value of their wharf. A subsequent investor tried to recoup the loss by suing the city. At trial, the injury to the property was proven, and damages were awarded. But the city won a reversal in the Maryland Court of Appeals. The plaintiff's appeal to the Supreme Court led to a holding that the Constitution's Bill of Rights did not give the Supreme Court jurisdiction in such cases, despite the Fifth Amendment's explicit protections against government taking private property. In view of Marshall's vigorous assertions of federal authority and a strong trend in earlier private property–taking cases to the contrary, more than a mere anomaly must be explained here

Appeal · Bill of rights · Constitution · Damages · Eminent Domain · Federal jurisdiction · Jurisdiction · Just compensation · Plaintiff · Political science · Sociology · Supreme court · Trial court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies