Missouri v. Holland

252 U.S. 416 (1920), argued 2 Mar. 1920, decided 19 Apr. 1920 by vote of 7 to 2; Holmes for the Court, Van Devanter and Pitney in dissent. The state of Missouri sought to enjoin a United States game warden from enforcing federal regulations enacted pursuant to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 on the grounds that the statute unconstitutionally interfered with rights reserved to the States under the Tenth Amendment. (See State Sovereignty and States' Rights.) The Bird Treaty Act had been passed to fulfill United States obligations under a treaty with Great Britain to protect migratory birds. (See Treaties and Treaty Power.) Missouri appealed from lower court decisions upholding the statute's constitutionality. An earlier federal statute to regulate the taking of migratory birds, not passed pursuant to an international treaty, had been held unconstitutional in lower courts on the grounds that the birds were owned by the states in their sovereign capacity and were therefore immune from federal regulation under the Tenth Amendment.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded that the statute was a “necessary and proper” means of executing the powers of the federal government, valid under Article I, section 8, because the United States had the authority to implement treaty obligations.

The Court held that since the treaty was valid it superseded state authority as the supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. This was so, Holmes wrote, because migratory birds did not respect national boundaries and were therefore appropriate subjects for regulation by agreement with other countries. Even if the states of the United States were capable of effectively regulating the subject, the Court found nothing in the Constitution to prohibit the federal government from acting by means of a treaty to deal with a “national interest of very nearly the first magnitude … [that] can be protected only by national action in concert with another power” (p. 435).

Holmes's analysis has been criticized as a bootstrap method to create new federal power by means of international treaty. Fears of an expansive application of this principle were instrumental in encouraging popular support for the “Bricker Amendment” in 1953, which would have amended the constitution to provide that “[a] treaty shall become effective as internal law in the United States only through legislation which would be valid in the absence of treaty.” In 1957, the Supreme Court relieved much of this public concern in Reid v. Covert, when it held that status of forces agreements between the United States and foreign countries could not deprive U.S. civilian dependants of the right to a jury trial by making them subject to military courts‐martial while they were stationed abroad. Citing Missouri v. Holland, the Court wrote, “To the extent that the United States can validly make treaties, the people and the States have delegated their power to the National Government and the Tenth Amendment is no barrier” (p. 18).

The Holland opinion has become largely irrelevant because of the greatly expanded scope of national power today over all matters touching interstate or foreign commerce. But the case has continuing importance. First, the opinion contains what has come to be regarded as the classic statement of the “living document” approach to constitutional interpretation in which historic practice, rather than the intent of the framers, is given primary emphasis (see Original Intent). Second, even though the controversy in this case concerned the scope of the treaty power, rather than treaty supremacy, the theory of the case has provided support for later Court decisions such as United States v. Belmont (1937) and United States v. Pink (1942) establishing the supremacy of federal executive agreements over state law.

Last, Holmes's emphasis on the proposition that matters of international concern necessarily give rise to federal power has provided support for later holdings where the Court found that state law may be preempted, even by federal common law, whenever the state rule may interfere with the conduct of foreign affairs by the national government.

— Harold G. Maier

Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920), was a 7 to 2 Supreme Court decision establishing that the treaty-making power allows the exercise of federal power in areas not specifically delegated to the national government. Following ratification of the Migratory Bird Treaty between the United States and Great Britain, Congress enacted legislation to enforce its provisions. The state of Missouri challenged the act as an encroachment on the jurisdiction reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment, a claim the Court rejected. Missouri v. Holland figured prominently in mid-twentieth-century debates over U.S. participation in organizations such as the United Nations and is also significant for its conception of the Constitution as a "living document," allowing decisions to be based on historical practice instead of strict reliance on original intent.

Bibliography

Bickel, Alexander M., and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. History of the Supreme Court of the United States. Volume 9: The Judiciary and Responsible Government 1910–21. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

Missouri v. Holland
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 29, 1918 Decided March 6, 1920
Full case name	State of Missouri v. Holland, United States Game Warden
Citations	252 U.S. 416 (more) 40 S. Ct. 382; 64 L. Ed. 641; 1920 U.S. LEXIS 1520; 11 A.L.R. 984; 18 Ohio L. Rep. 61
Prior history	Appeal from the District Court of the United States for the Western District of Missouri
Holding
Treaties made by the federal government are supreme over any state concerns about such treaties having abrogated any states' rights arising under the Tenth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice Edward D. White Associate Justices Joseph McKenna · Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. William R. Day · Willis Van Devanter Mahlon Pitney · James C. McReynolds Louis Brandeis · John H. Clarke
Case opinions
Majority	Holmes, joined by White, McKenna, Day, McReynolds, Brandeis, Clarke
Dissent	Van Devanter
Dissent	Pitney
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. X

Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920), the United States Supreme Court held that the federal government's ability to make treaties is supreme over any state concerns about such treaties having abrogated any states' rights arising under the Tenth Amendment. The case revolved around the constitutionality of implementing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. It is also notable for Justice Holmes' reference to the idea of a living constitution.

Contents 1 Facts 2 Judgment 3 Reception 4 See also 5 Footnotes 6 External links

Facts

Previously, Congress had passed laws regulating the hunting of migratory waterfowl on the basis that such birds naturally migrated across state and international borders freely, and hence the regulation of the harvest of such birds could not realistically be considered to be province solely of individual states or groups of states. However, several states objected to this theory and successfully sued to have the law declared unconstitutional, on the premise that the United States Constitution gave Congress no enumerated power to regulate migratory bird hunting, and hence the regulation of such hunting, if there was to be any, was the province of the states according to the Tenth Amendment.

Congress, disgruntled with this ruling, then empowered the State Department to negotiate with the United Kingdom, which at the time still largely handled the foreign relations of Canada, a treaty pertaining to this issue. The treaty was subsequently ratified and came into force, and required the Federal Government to enact laws regulating the capturing, killing, or selling of the protected migratory birds [1], an obligation that it fulfilled in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The state of Missouri then sued on the basis that the federal government had no authority to negotiate a treaty on this topic.

Judgment

In an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Supreme Court held that the law was in fact constitutional, noting that the treaties clause of the Constitution (Article VI, clause 2), sometimes known as the "supremacy clause," makes treaties the "supreme law of the land," a finding that trumps any state-level concerns with regard to the provisions of any treaty (though it does not trump other provisions of the constitution), and further implying that treaty provisions were not subject to questioning by the states under the process of judicial review.

In the course of his judgment, Holmes made this remark on the nature of the constitution.

"With regard to that we may add that when we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of out whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago. The treaty in question does not contravene any prohibitory words to be found in the Constitution. The only question is whether [252 U.S. 416, 434] it is forbidden by some invisible radiation from the general terms of the Tenth Amendment. We must consider what this country has become in deciding what that amendment has reserved."

Reception

Many persons saw^[1] and still see^[2] this ruling as a dangerous implication that Congress or the President could essentially amend the Constitution by the means of treaties with other countries that would abrogate the rights of the people or the States otherwise protected by American law. These concerns came to a head in the 1950s with the Bricker Amendment, a series of proposed amendments which would have placed restrictions on the scope and ratification of treaties and executive agreements entered into by the United States. The Bricker Amendment nearly passed Congress with the required two-thirds majority. More recently, a similar provision has been proposed as the fourth article of the Bill of Federalism, a list of ten proposed amendments drafted by Law Professor Randy Barnett.

Thomas Healy has suggested that Missouri may not even be 'good law' - meaning that more recent decisions could be seen to overturn Missouri, and establish new limits on the Treaty power^[3].

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 252
• Reid v. Covert, a 1957 case which stated that no treaty can come in direct violation of the United States Constitution, a partial limitation of the ability of the United States to use treaties.
• Medellin v. Texas, US Supreme Court 2008. The Medellin case cast some doubt on how broadly Missouri v. Holland can be applied. Texas had ignored obligations of the United States under a convention, despite a relevant presidential order and a finding of the International Court of Justice. The individual defendant (who had been sentenced to death) was held by the courts, including the Supreme Court, not to have any personal rights to challenge his conviction because of this breach of the United States' international obligations.

Footnotes

1. ^ Sutherland, A.E. (1951), "Restricting the Treaty Power", Harvard Law Review 65: 1305, http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=info:FsCb0Yyv2iEJ:scholar.google.com/&output=viewport 
2. ^ Rosenkranz, N.Q. (2004), "Executing the Treaty Power", Harvard Law Review 118: 1867, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/118/April05/RosenkranzFTX.pdf, retrieved 2009-06-04 
3. ^ Healy, T. (1998), "Is" Missouri v. Holland" Still Good Law? Federalism and the Treaty Power", Columbia Law Review: 1726–1756, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1123464, retrieved 2009-06-04 

External links

• Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920) (opinion full text).

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