Gibbons v. Ogden

( 1824 ) Commentary by Thomas H. Cox, Sam Houston State University

“Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse.” - Chief Justice John Marshall
“The mind can scarcely conceive a system for regulating commerce between nations which shall exclude all laws concerning navigation, which shall be silent on the admission of the vessels of the one nation into the ports of the other, and be confined to prescribing rules for the conduct of individuals in the actual employment of buying and selling or of barter.” - Chief Justice John Marshall
“Powerful and ingenious minds, taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are retained if any possible construction will retain them may, by a course of well digested but refined and metaphysical reasoning founded on these premises, explain away the constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use.” - Chief Justice John Marshall
“The great and paramount purpose was to unite this mass of wealth and power, for the protection of the humblest individual, his rights, civil and political, his interests and prosperity, are the sole end; the rest are nothing but the means.” - Justice William Johnson

Gibbons v. Ogden (National Archives and Records Administration)

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