Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol III).djvu/596

 418 court gives judgment against him. This would be a case arising under the constitution, and would be the very case now before the court.

§ 1713. We are also asked, if a state should confiscate property secured by a treaty, whether the individual could maintain an action for that property? If the property confiscated be debts, our own experience informs us, that the remedy of the creditor against his debtor remains. If it be land, which is secured by a treaty, and afterwards confiscated by a state, the argument does not assume, that this title, thus secured, could be extinguished by an act of confiscation. The injured party, therefore, has his remedy against the occupant of the land for that, which the treaty secures to him; not against the state for money, which is not secured to him.

§ 1714. The case of a state, which pays off its own debts with paper money, no more resembles this, than do those, to which we have already adverted. The courts have no jurisdiction over the contract. They cannot enforce it, nor judge of its violation. Let it be, that the act discharging the debt is a mere nullity, and that it is still due. Yet the federal courts have no cognizance of the case. But suppose a state to institute proceedings against an individual, which depended on the validity of an act emitting bills of credit: suppose a state to prosecute one of its citizens for refusing paper money, who should plead the constitution in bar of such prosecution. If his plea should be overruled, and judgment rendered against him, his case would resemble this; and, unless the jurisdiction of this court might be exercised over it, the constitution would be violated, and the injured party be unable to bring his case before that tribunal, to which the people of the United States