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8 

VIDAL v. ELSTER 

Opinion of the Court 

Case lieth”).  So, the content of the mark (whether it was 
the same as another person’s) triggered the restriction. 

Although there was an early push for federal legislation 
to protect trademarks, no such law was enacted during our
country’s infancy.  See B. Paster, Trademarks—Their Early 
History, 59 Trademark Rep. 551, 565–566 (1969); see also
F. Schechter, Historical Foundations of the Law Relating to
Trade-Marks  131  (1925)  (Schechter).  Instead,  trademark 
law fell largely within “the province of the States” for the 
18th and most of the 19th century.  Tam, 582 U. S., at 224. 
For example, Massachusetts passed a private bill incorpo-
rating a cotton corporation on the condition that it affix a 
label to its goods “with the seal of the said Corporation.”  1 
Mass.  Private  and  Special  Laws,  1789,  ch.  43,  §5,  p. 226
(1805).  The law also prevented others from “us[ing] a like
seal or label” by subjecting them to treble damages.  Ibid. 
To be sure, for most of our first century, most commerce was 
local and most consumers therefore knew the source of the 
goods they purchased.  See R. Bone, Hunting Goodwill: A 
History of the Concept of Goodwill in Trademark Law, 86 
B. U. L. Rev. 547, 575 (2006).  “[E]ven as late as 1860 the
term ‘trademark’ really denoted only the name of the man-
ufacturer.”  B. Pattishall, Two Hundred Years of American 
Trademark  Law,  68  Trademark  Rep.  121,  128  (1978). 
There was nonetheless “a certain amount of litigation in the 
state  courts  in  the  early  nineteenth  century,”  though  it 
went unrecorded.  Schechter 133. 

The  “first  reported  American  decision  that  may  be  de-
scribed  as  a  trademark  case”  involved  a  dispute  over  the 
content of a mark—and in particular, the use of a person’s 
name.  Pattishall, Constitutional Foundations, at 460.  In 
Thomson v. Winchester, 36 Mass. 214, 216 (1837), Samuel 
Thomson—who  sold  a  medicine  under  the  name  “Thom-
sonian  Medicines”—brought  suit  against  another  Massa-
chusetts druggist who sold an allegedly inferior product un-
der the same name.  The court held that the druggist could