The Essentials of American Constitutional Law

Transcriber’s Note
Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.
Francis Newton Thorpe, Ph.D. LL.D.
(Of the Pennsylvania Bar) Professor of Political Science and Constitutional Law University of Pittsburgh
“It is a Constitution we are expounding.”— John Marshall
G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press
Copyright, 1917 BY FRANCIS NEWTON THORPE
Made in the United States of America
AD JUVENES LEGUM STUDIOSOS QUANDO ADVOCATOS JUDICES LEGISLATORES HODIE ANNORUM AMICOS HIC LIBELLUS DEDICATUS
The principles of American constitutional law are the foundation of all judicial decisions, and it is (as Marshall observes) “the province and duty of the Courts to say what the law is.” Judicial decisions, however, are technical, are handed down by experts, and set forth authoritatively as results of experience which the junior student of the law is likely to find difficult, if not incomprehensible. But to attempt merely to simplify the law, or its interpretation by the Courts, is likely to result in variation from the original spirit and purpose of the law: because decisions are essentially a reduction of questions at issue to a principle, and laws themselves are (or ought to be) simple, clear, comprehensive, and complete.
For purposes of study or instruction it is necessary to bring the principle involved in a law (be it the Supreme Law of the Land,—that is, the Constitution, a Treaty, or an Act of Congress; or a State Constitution, or an Act of a State Legislature) within the compass of a principle, or a fundamental, by examination of an issue, or issues, in which the principle is involved. There must ever be before the Court the issue and the law, and the law itself may be an issue, in the American system of government which recognizes the authority of the Court to pass on the constitutionality of the law.
But principles are not numerous. Possibly in Nature there is but one basic principle and all our so-called “natural laws” are but aspects of that principle as the human mind conceives or recognizes it. The analogy in government permits the assertion that the principles of constitutional law are few. Possibly they are severally aspects of one principle: that of sovereignty. To the student of the law, especially to junior students, principles are matters of memory rather than of understanding. It is a vigorous and essentially mature mind that can reduce a complex issue to such simple form as to deduce the principle on which it rests.