Commerce Clause, Gibbons v. Ogden

[Emsworth]

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)

The Supreme Court held that the commerce clause allows Congress to regulate navigation on interstate waterways.

Mr. Chief Justice MARSHALL delivered the opinion of the Court ...

The subject to be regulated is commerce, and our Constitution being, as was aptly said at the bar, one of enumeration, and not of definition, to ascertain the extent of the power, it becomes necessary to settle the meaning of the word. The counsel for the appellee would limit it to traffic, to buying and selling, or the interchange of commodities, and do not admit that it comprehends navigation. This would restrict a general term, applicable to many objects, to one of its significations. Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse. It describes the commercial intercourse between nations, and parts of nations, in all its branches, and is regulated by prescribing rules for carrying on that intercourse. The mind can scarcely conceive a system for regulating commerce between nations which shall exclude all laws concerning navigation.

[A18]

Constitutionally sound.

At the time of the founding, the word "commerce" was used interchangeably with "trade." Interstate commerce is the exchange of goods and services across state lines, and the power to regulate it includes the power to regulate shipping, because of its intimate connection with trade.

There is no need to get into an extensive analysis of extraconstitutional materials of the time period. The strongest argument that the power to regulate "commerce" extended to navigation is found in the plain text of the Constitution itself. Article I, Section 9 prohibits Congress from enacting any "Regulation of Commerce" that gives preference "to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another."

There is of course other evidence. To name just one, the records of Philadelphia Convention are telling. The debate over whether acts concerning navigation should require a supermajority occurred specifically in the context of the power to regulate interstate commerce.

For example, John Rutledge of South Carolina asserted that "it did not follow from a grant of the power to regulate trade, that it would be abused. At the worst a navigation act could bear hard a little while only on the Southern states."