United States v. Coolidge

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Story served on the Supreme Court from 1812 until 1845, and during his long tenure he left an enduring mark on the federal courts. Although he was one of the youngest justices ever appointed to the Court, he arrived with well-developed visions of economic development and constitutional governance. He also brought a penchant for scholarship that synthesized a wide range of legal rules into coherent form and provided the Court, especially when it was under the leadership of Chief Justice John Marshall, with an appearance of intellectual stature. From his position on the bench, Story participated in what many historians identify as a transformation of American law that saw judges taking the lead in making the common law more conducive to rapid capitalist economic growth. His 1829 ruling in Van Ness v. Pacard for example, jettisoned a common law rule discouraging lessees from improving the land they rented in favor of a newly created one allowing them do so without penalty, a change that moderately encouraged economic development. In Swift v. Tyson (1842), Story articulated a procedural rule in a manner favoring the expanded transferability of the negotiable financial instruments that fueled business investment in nineteenth-century America.

Story's constitutional opinions likewise encouraged economic growth, but he also generally argued that state legislatures needed federal oversight and restraint. One of his first rulings, Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816), held that the Supreme Court possessed the right to review decisions originating in the state courts. Likewise, his concurring opinion in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) agreed with Chief Justice John Marshall's majority opinion holding that the Constitution barred the state from altering the charters of private corporations but did so in a manner that both clearly articulated the distinction between public and private corporations and ensured that incorporated business enterprises fell into the latter category. Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of Story's work on the Court, however, rests in his aggressive judicial nationalism and passionate advocacy for using the common law in the federal courts.

Few decisions demonstrate these features of Story's work more clearly than his relatively early circuit court ruling in United States v. Coolidge (1813). In this case, Story's Massachusetts circuit court had before it “an indictment against Cornelius Coolidge and others for forcibly rescuing a prize,” but this crime—the act of retaking goods that had been legally seized by another—appeared in no federal statute. The question before the court therefore involved “whether the circuit court of the United States has jurisdiction to punish offences against the United States, which have not been previously defined, and a specific punishment affixed, by some statute of the United States.” Story displayed more than a bit of audacity in confronting this issue. For one thing, the Supreme Court had recently ruled in an 1812 decision, United States v. Hudson and Goodwin, that the federal courts could not employ a common law of crimes.

In the early 1800s, moreover, federal common law represented a deeply contested matter. Part of the controversy stemmed from the argument that the government created by the Constitution possessed only enumerated powers, such that its courts could access only those powers given to them by statute or by the Constitution itself. This debate had intensified after the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 because he and his supporters generally advocated a strict construction of constitutional language, and they interpreted use of the common law by the federal judiciary to be an aspect of a Federalist plot to undermine the Republic. Another part of the controversy grew out of arguments that the common law, in whatever jurisdiction, was ill suited to a true republican government because its general impenetrability rendered it inaccessible to lay readers and because its judge-made character provided a potential tool for tyrants. Critics holding this perspective, known to historians as codificationists, contended that a republic needed a written code of laws that any citizen could read and understand. Story's Coolidge opinion ran counter to these trends. It rejected Hudson and Goodwin and called for a federal common law of crimes, defending this potentially great expansion of federal jurisdiction by portraying the common law as a proper foundation for republican governance.

Story begins his opinion by paying lip service to the enumerated nature of federal powers—“I admit … that the courts of the United States are courts of limited jurisdiction, and cannot exercise any authorities, which are not confided to them by the constitution and laws made in pursuance thereof”—but he insists that the proper exercise of those powers requires the common law. Where the Constitution or a statute grants a power, he contends, “the nature and extent of that authority, and the mode, in which it shall be exercised, must be regulated by the rules of the common law.” A proper understanding of the Constitution, Story continues, requires that one draw upon the common law. For example, the document mandates trials by jury for criminal cases (excluding impeachment), and Story supposes “that no person can doubt, that for the explanation of these terms, and for the mode of conducting trials by jury, recourse must be had to the common law.” Without reference to the common law, the clause giving the federal courts broad jurisdiction over “all cases in law and equity arising under the constitution” would be “inexplicable.” He provides one final example: “The clause providing, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Only the common law defined this writ and the privileges it conferred. Story concludes that “the existence … of the common law is not only supposed by the constitution, but is appealed to for the construction and interpretation of its powers.”

Congress, Story continues, certainly holds the authority to give the circuit courts jurisdiction over all common law crimes. Indeed, it had done so in the Judiciary Act of 1789, which stipulated “that the circuit court shall have exclusive cognizance of all crimes and offences cognizable under the authority of the United States, except where that act otherwise provides, or the laws of the United States shall otherwise direct, and concurrent jurisdiction with the district courts of the crimes and offences cognizable therein.'” Congress had not subsequently narrowed that grant of judicial power. Story then departs from the Supreme Court's ruling in Hudson and Goodwin, asserting, “The jurisdiction is not … over all crimes and offences specially created and defined by statute. It is of all crimes and offences cognizable under the authority of the United States,' that is, of all crimes and offences, to which by the constitution of the United States, the judicial power extends.” Congress thus bestowed that jurisdiction in “broad and comprehensive terms.”

Having established his circuit court's authority to hear criminal cases, Story then proceeds to define what sort of actions constitute a crime or an offense under the Constitution. He again insists that this step requires “recourse … to the principles of the common law,” but he now casts his argument in a manner that responds to codificationist arguments portraying the common law as inherently arbitrary. Congress had passed statutes providing “for the punishment of murder, manslaughter and perjury … but it has no where defined these crimes.” One must find the needed definitions in the common law, since “upon any other supposition, the judicial power of the United States would be left … to the mere arbitrary pleasure of the judges, to an uncontrollable and undefined discretion. Whatever may be the dread of the common law,… such a despotic power could hardly be deemed more desirable.” Looking across the federal system, Story sees many opportunities for this troublesome discretion. Federal courts could follow state common law in some cases (as the Judiciary Act of 1789, in fact, required of them), but that recourse provided only partial coverage. Massachusetts, for example, recognized no distinction between law and equity; federal courts, rather, did. “How then,” Story asks, “shall a suit in equity pending in the circuit court for that district be managed or decided?” Likewise, the United States exclusively exercised admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, the definition of which had to come from the common law. As Story concludes here, “Nothing is more clear, than that the interpretation and exercise of the vested jurisdiction of the courts of the United States must, in the absence of positive law, be governed exclusively by the common law.”

Story proceeds to call for a sweeping expansion of federal jurisdiction, of which his understanding embraces “all offences against the sovereignty, the public rights, the public justice, the public peace, the public trade and the public police of the United States.” Federal jurisdiction thus included “treasons, and conspiracies to commit treason, embezzlement of the public records, bribery and resistance of the judicial process, riots and misdemeanors on the high seas, frauds and obstructions of the public laws of trade, and robbery and embezzlement of the mail of the United States.” The power to punish those committing such offenses must go along with this jurisdiction, as “to suppose a power in a court to try an offence, and not to award any punishment, is to suppose, that the legislature is guilty of the folly of promoting litigation without object, and prohibiting acts, only for the purpose of their being scoffed at in the most solemn manner.” Congress, according to Story's reading of the Judiciary Act of 1789, authorized trials of common law crimes, and “it must be deemed to authorize the court to render such a judgment, as the guilt or innocence of the party may require.”

Defining a punishment, Story continues, presents no obstacle in these cases, because “the common law affords the proper answer.” He writes, “In all cases, where the legislature prohibit any act without annexing any punishment, the common law considers it an indictable offence, and attaches to the breach the penalty of fine and imprisonment.” Story is so certain of this rule that he insists that if Congress had not assigned a punishment to treason, “I have no doubt, that the punishment by fine and imprisonment must have attached to the offence.” At this point, Story again emphasizes the common law's status as a protector of liberty by returning to his discussion of habeas corpus. He notes that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus is so high and interesting, that it has become a prominent article in the constitution,” while the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized circuit courts to grant the writ; “but if nothing more could be done under it, than the legislature have expressly provided, it would be a mere dead letter for its most important purposes.” Habeas corpus, Story asserts, “is made the great bulwark of the citizen against the oppressions of the government” only through the reinforcement provided by the common law.

Story thus reaches his conclusions. He holds that the circuit courts possess jurisdiction over the present offense and all other ones against the United States, that the common law provides the definition of these offenses where Congress had not, and that punishments, in the absence of directive statutes, would take the form of fine and imprisonment. In drawing to a close he makes his only mention of Hudson and Goodwin, a decision that, though “entitled to the most respectful consideration,” needed revisiting. The case actually did not receive a hearing by the full Supreme Court and was not argued before its members; a question of such jurisdictional import deserved a more thorough hearing. Regarding the present case, Story promises to “submit, with the utmost cheerfulness, to the judgment of my brethren,” and he takes comfort in the knowledge that, if his opinion proved mistaken, “their superior learning and ability will save the public from an injury by my error.” Indeed, his colleagues did not accept his arguments. When the case came before the Supreme Court in 1816, the attorney general William Wirt pronounced his belief that the issue had been settled in Hudson and Goodwin; Story voiced his disagreement, while Justice William Johnson, who had written Hudson and Goodwin, supported Wirt. Justices Henry Livingston and Bushrod Washington were receptive to hearing arguments, but no counsel for Coolidge appeared, and no arguments took place. The ruling in Hudson and Goodwin thus stood as good law.

Near the end of his career, Story would gain a measure of redemption on the common law issue. In 1842 he convinced his colleagues—on a Court composed, with the exception of Story, of justices appointed after 1816—that the federal courts had a limited common law jurisdiction over certain commercial questions. He did so in Swift v. Tyson, which interpreted a provision of the Judiciary Act of 1789 in a manner that permitted the federal courts to approach state court rulings as merely advisory. His approach essentially allowed U.S. courts access to a federal common law of commerce. Yet his Swift opinion had none of his Coolidge opinion's call for a sweeping common law jurisdiction. Rather, Story's 1842 opinion applied primarily to questions related to negotiable instruments—but through subsequent cases his common law of commerce gradually expanded, first to insurance contracts, then to the construction of wills, and so on. One of Swift's closest students estimates that by 1900, common law principles invoked by later decisions covered more than twenty-five areas of law. Story's common law thinking therefore exerted a powerful influence over the federal courts into the twentieth century.