The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-06-21

ments with seclusion of the opportunity of perrn~'r~ ''' . f--~;-r.;~-, of r,uLlic gatherin
 The HOLLAND HOUSE, 5th Ave. & st whenever the Emperor has judi cially considered a case, and announc- ed a decision to the parties who have appeared in the controversy, let all judges, without exception. within the imperial Jurisdiction, know that this is the law not only for the individual case in which it was rendered, but also in an like cases.'' This Justinian rule, relevant to the binding force of supreme Judicial de- cisions, was finally adopted in Eng land during the time of the Plantage- net kings, and as early as the reign of Edward III, in the fourteenth cen tury. And Blackstone, in his Com mentaries on the Laws of England, written four centuries later, stated that the House of Peers was then the supreme court of judicature in the tribunal must conform to the deter minations of that court.
 It was this constitution of the Su- preme court of judicature in the Unit ed Kingdom of Great Britain, that was in existence at the time of the separation of the thirteen American colonies from the mother@country, and at the time of our constitutional con- yeution of 17S7. That conventions
 the members of which must have been we'll acquainted with this point in the laws of Great Britain, inserted in the Constitution which it framed the following provision: "The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and es- ta blish." ~
 r,l, c.ti vention of the same words, Supreme Court which were used in the then extant and well known Commentar- ies of Blackstone to designate the House of Peeers, clearly implies that the members of the constitutional convention intended those words to have the same meaning relevant to the judicial department of the gov ernment of the United States that they were we'll known to have rele- want to the judicial department of the government of the United Kingdom. And that meaning expressly included the statement that every subordinate tribunal must conform it's decisions to the decisions of the House of Peers. Thus, the presence in Section l, of Article III, of the Constitution of the words "one Supreme Court" in con- nection with the words inferior courts, plainly implies that the fram- CTS of the Constitution meant to pro- vide that the decisions of the Supreme Court on questions of law, should De binding on the inferior courts which Congress was authorized, by that sec tion, 70 establish.
 When hereafter the circuit and dis
 erict judges of the United States make decisions in litigated Sherman law cases. and make those decisions conform to the decisions of the Su-. preme Court in the Trans Missouri case and the Joint Traffic case, those Federal judges will be conforming also to the judicial opinions of most of their own brethren who have heretofore adjudicated similar cases.
 Many imperfectiy instructed citf- zens of the United States suppose that the Supreme Court of the United States has power to revise acts of Congress- by such additions, diminu- tions and other changes, as the court thinks proper to make. For this reason, many thousands of men who are engaged in managing corpora tions, were waiting more than year prior to May 15, 1911, for the expect ed decision of the Supreme Court in the Standard Oil case; on the theory that nobody could know the purport of the Sherman Law, until after the Supreme Court had decided that case; and that thereupon the Sherman Law would have whatever significance or insignificance the decision of the Stan dard Oil case might impart to 1t. The next morning after that decision was rendered. those men, with remarkable unanimity, disregarded the decision it. self as negligible, and concentrated their attention upon the Obiter dicta of Chief Justice White. Reading those obiter dicta, or at least reading the published extracts therefrom, ed that they amounted to g. judicial decision, and that that judicial de- cision constituted such radical amendmen of the Sherman Law al to deprive it of all force, except as against few of the most utterly fla grant restraints of interstate or inter national trade or commerce.
 All students of the constitution of the United States know that the judi cial power of the United States is limited to deciding litigated cases; and that according to that constitu- tion, all those decisions must be made in conformity to the enacted laws of the country. Those enacted laws com prise the constitution of the United States, and the statutes and treaties which have been made in conformity to the constitution Where any party in any litigated case claims that a particular statute or treaty is out of. conformity to the constitution to de- eide that question; and its decision is binding on everybody. No other court Tn the WOr1Q ever ndQ SuCn q power as that But where, as in the Standard Oil case. no party claims that the statute upon which it is bas- ed is unconstitutional, and where there is no such question involved in the litigation. the Supreme Court has no power to change that statute, in any way whatever. If that court should undertake to accomplish such a change, by a judicial decision, it would be competent for the Congress to instantly enact a statute to change it back again. When the Chief Jus tice of that court, or any associate justice, speaking for himself alone, or for a majority of the justices or even for all of them. presumes to promul- gate, as if it were the law. an obiter dictum on any point not involved in the case in which it is promulgated: then it is competent for the Con gress to repudiate that obiter dictum and thus prevent it from misleading the people.
 Roosevelt smoked a Nugget while in town. a"I