Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol III).djvu/620

 612 delivering over the subject to perpetual, and irremediable doubts. The same subject is most elaborately considered in Cohens v. Virginia, (6 Wheat. R. 413 to 423,) from which the following extract is taken. After adverting to the nature of the national government, and its powers and capacities, Mr. Chief Justice Marshall proceeds as follows. "In a government so constituted, is it unreasonable, that the judicial power should be competent to give efficacy to the constitutional laws of the legislature? That department can decide on the validity of the constitution, or law of a state, if it be repugnant to the constitution, or to a law of the United States. Is it unreasonable, that it should also be empowered to decide on the judgment of a state tribunal, enforcing such unconstitutional law? Is it so very unreasonable, as to furnish a justification for controlling the words of the constitution?

"We think it is not. We think that in a government, acknowledgedly supreme with respect to objects of vital interest to the nation, there is nothing inconsistent with sound reason, nothing incompatible with the nature of government, in making all its departments supreme, so far as respects those objects, and so far as is necessary to their attainment. The exercise of the appellate power, over those judgments of the state tribunals, which may contravene the constitution, or laws of the United States, is, we believe, essential to the attainment of those objects.

"The propriety of entrusting the construction of the constitution, and laws made in pursuance thereof, to the judiciary of the Union, has not, we believe, as yet been drawn into question. It seems to be a corollary from this political axiom, that the federal courts should either possess exclusive jurisdiction in such cases, or a power to revise the judgment rendered in them by the state tribunals. If the federal and state courts have concurrent jurisdiction in all cases arising under the constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States; and, if a case of this description, brought in a state court, cannot be removed before judgment, nor revised after judgment, then the construction of the constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States, is not confided particularly to their judicial department; but is confided equally to that department, and to the state courts, however they may be constituted. 'Thirteen independent courts,' says a very celebrated statesman, (and we have now, more than twenty such courts,) 'of final jurisdiction over the same causes, arising upon the same laws, is a hydra in government, from which, nothing but contradiction and confusion can proceed.'

"Dismissing the unpleasant suggestion, that any motives, which may not be fairly avowed, or which ought not to exist, can ever influence a state, or its courts, the necessity of uniformity, as well as correctness, in expounding the constitution and laws of the United States, would itself