Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 752.0

524US2

Unit: $U97

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Cite as: 524 U. S. 666 (1998)

707

Breyer, J., dissenting

tion presented here.
“what did Murphy hold,” but “was Murphy right?”

In other words, we must ask not,

B

Since Murphy is prevailing law, the majority bears the
burden of showing that Murphy is wrong; and the majority
says that Murphy’s reasoning is “fatally ﬂawed” and legally
“unsound.” Ante, at 687–688. But it is not. Murphy’s
reasoning ﬁnds in Malloy’s holding (that the privilege binds
the States) a need to reexamine the “same sovereign” rule,
ﬁrst set forth in the earlier case of Murdock. Without re-
examination, Murdock’s rule would have permitted State
and Federal Governments each to have compelled testimony
for use by the other. Murphy’s reasoning then ﬁnds the
“same sovereign” rule unsound as a matter of history and of
the basic purposes of the privilege.

Murphy’s use of legal history is traditional.

It notes that
Murdock rested its own conclusion upon earlier English and
It reads the language of those cases in
American cases.
light of the reasons that underlie it.
It says that, so read,
those cases did not stand for a “same sovereign” rule, but
suggested the contrary. And it concludes that Murdock’s
legal pedigree is suspicious or illegitimate.
In a word, Mur-
phy examines Murdock’s historical pedigree very much the
way that the majority today analyzes that of Murphy. The
difference, however, is that Murphy makes a better case for
overturning its predecessor than does the majority.

I can reiterate the essence of Murphy’s analysis, amending

it to ﬁt the present case, roughly as follows:

1. Murdock thought that English law embodied a
“same sovereign” rule, but it did not. Two early Eng-
lish cases, one decided in 1749 and the other in 1750,
held that the privilege applied even though the feared
prosecution was, in the one case, in Calcutta, and in the
other, by ecclesiastical authorities. East India Co. v.