United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, the Senate being the upper chamber. Together they compose the legislature of the United States; the composition of the House is established by Article One of the United States Constitution. The House is composed of Representatives who sit in congressional districts that are allocated to each of the 50 states on a basis of population as measured by the U. S. Census, with each district entitled to one representative. Since its inception in 1789, all Representatives have been directly elected; the total number of voting representatives is fixed by law at 435. As of the 2010 Census, the largest delegation is that of California, with fifty-three representatives. Seven states have only one representative: Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming; the House is charged with the passage of federal legislation, known as bills, after concurrence by the Senate, are sent to the President for consideration.
In addition to this basic power, the House has certain exclusive powers, among them the power to initiate all bills related to revenue. The House meets in the south wing of the United States Capitol; the presiding officer is the Speaker of the House, elected by the members thereof. The Speaker and other floor leaders are chosen by the Democratic Caucus or the Republican Conference, depending on whichever party has more voting members. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress of the Confederation was a unicameral body in which each state was represented, in which each state had a veto over most action. After eight years of a more limited confederal government under the Articles, numerous political leaders such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton initiated the Constitutional Convention in 1787, which received the Confederation Congress's sanction to "amend the Articles of Confederation". All states except Rhode Island agreed to send delegates; the issue of how to structure Congress was one of the most divisive among the founders during the Convention.
Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan called for a bicameral Congress: the lower house would be "of the people", elected directly by the people of the United States and representing public opinion, a more deliberative upper house, elected by the lower house, that would represent the individual states, would be less susceptible to variations of mass sentiment. The House is referred to as the lower house, with the Senate being the upper house, although the United States Constitution does not use that terminology. Both houses' approval is necessary for the passage of legislation; the Virginia Plan drew the support of delegates from large states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, as it called for representation based on population. The smaller states, favored the New Jersey Plan, which called for a unicameral Congress with equal representation for the states; the Convention reached the Connecticut Compromise or Great Compromise, under which one house of Congress would provide representation proportional to each state's population, whereas the other would provide equal representation amongst the states.
The Constitution was ratified by the requisite number of states in 1788, but its implementation was set for March 4, 1789. The House began work on April 1789, when it achieved a quorum for the first time. During the first half of the 19th century, the House was in conflict with the Senate over regionally divisive issues, including slavery; the North was much more populous than the South, therefore dominated the House of Representatives. However, the North held no such advantage in the Senate, where the equal representation of states prevailed. Regional conflict was most pronounced over the issue of slavery. One example of a provision supported by the House but blocked by the Senate was the Wilmot Proviso, which sought to ban slavery in the land gained during the Mexican–American War. Conflict over slavery and other issues persisted until the Civil War, which began soon after several southern states attempted to secede from the Union; the war culminated in the abolition of slavery. All southern senators except Andrew Johnson resigned their seats at the beginning of the war, therefore the Senate did not hold the balance of power between North and South during the war.
The years of Reconstruction that followed witnessed large majorities for the Republican Party, which many Americans associated with the Union's victory in the Civil War and the ending of slavery. The Reconstruction period ended in about 1877; the Democratic Party and Republican Party each held majorities in the House at various times. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a dramatic increase in the power of the Speaker of the House; the rise of the Speaker's influence began in the 1890s, during the tenure of Republican Thomas Brackett Reed. "Czar Reed", as he was nicknamed, attempted to put into effect his view that "The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch." The leadership structure of the House developed during the same period, with the positions of Majority Leader and Minority Leader being created in 1899. While the Minority Leader
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. Established pursuant to Article III of the U. S. Constitution in 1789, it has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, including suits between two or more states and those involving ambassadors, it has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all federal court and state court cases that involve a point of federal constitutional or statutory law. The Court has the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution or an executive act for being unlawful. However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law over which it has jurisdiction; the court may decide cases having political overtones, but it has ruled that it does not have power to decide nonjusticiable political questions. Each year it agrees to hear about one hundred to one hundred fifty of the more than seven thousand cases that it is asked to review.
According to federal statute, the court consists of the Chief Justice of the United States and eight associate justices, all of whom are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Once appointed, justices have lifetime tenure unless they resign, retire, or are removed from office; each justice has a single vote in deciding. When the chief justice is in the majority, he decides. In modern discourse, justices are categorized as having conservative, moderate, or liberal philosophies of law and of judicial interpretation. While a far greater number of cases in recent history have been decided unanimously, decisions in cases of the highest profile have come down to just one single vote, exemplifying the justices' alignment according to these categories; the Court meets in the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D. C, its law enforcement arm is the Supreme Court of the United States Police. It was while debating the division of powers between the legislative and executive departments that delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention established the parameters for the national judiciary.
Creating a "third branch" of government was a novel idea. Early on, some delegates argued that national laws could be enforced by state courts, while others, including James Madison, advocated for a national judicial authority consisting of various tribunals chosen by the national legislature, it was proposed that the judiciary should have a role in checking the executive power to veto or revise laws. In the end, the Framers compromised by sketching only a general outline of the judiciary, vesting federal judicial power in "one supreme Court, in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish", they delineated neither the exact powers and prerogatives of the Supreme Court nor the organization of the Template:Judicial branch as a whole. The 1st United States Congress provided the detailed organization of a federal judiciary through the Judiciary Act of 1789; the Supreme Court, the country's highest judicial tribunal, was to sit in the nation's Capital and would be composed of a chief justice and five associate justices.
The act divided the country into judicial districts, which were in turn organized into circuits. Justices were required to "ride circuit" and hold circuit court twice a year in their assigned judicial district. After signing the act into law, President George Washington nominated the following people to serve on the court: John Jay for chief justice and John Rutledge, William Cushing, Robert H. Harrison, James Wilson, John Blair Jr. as associate justices. All six were confirmed by the Senate on September 26, 1789. Harrison, declined to serve. In his place, Washington nominated James Iredell; the Supreme Court held its inaugural session from February 2 through February 10, 1790, at the Royal Exchange in New York City the U. S. capital. A second session was held there in August 1790; the earliest sessions of the court were devoted to organizational proceedings, as the first cases did not reach it until 1791. When the national capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, the Supreme Court did so as well.
After meeting at Independence Hall, the Court established its chambers at City Hall. Under Chief Justices Jay and Ellsworth, the Court heard few cases; as the Court had only six members, every decision that it made by a majority was made by two-thirds. However, Congress has always allowed less than the court's full membership to make decisions, starting with a quorum of four justices in 1789; the court lacked a home of its own and had little prestige, a situation not helped by the era's highest-profile case, Chisholm v. Georgia, reversed within two years by the adoption of the Eleventh Amendment; the court's power and prestige grew during the Marshall Court. Under Marshall, the court established the power of judicial review over acts of Congress, including specifying itself as the supreme expositor of the Constitution and making several important constitutional rulings that gave shape and substance to the balance of power between the federal government and states; the Marshall Court ended the practice of each justice issuin
John Marshall
John James Marshall was an American politician who served as the fourth Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835. Marshall remains the longest-serving chief justice and fourth-longest serving justice in Supreme Court history, he is regarded as one of the most influential justices to sit on the Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Supreme Court, Marshall served as the United States Secretary of State under President John Adams. Marshall was born in Fauquier County, Virginia in 1755. After the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, he joined the Continental Army, serving in numerous battles. During the stages of the war, he was admitted to the state bar and won election to the Virginia House of Delegates. Marshall favored the ratification of the United States Constitution, he played a major role in Virginia's ratification of that document. At the request of President Adams, Marshall traveled to France in 1797 to help bring an end to attacks on American shipping. In what became known as the XYZ Affair, the government of France refused to open negotiations unless the United States agreed to pay bribes.
After returning to the United States, Marshall won election to the United States House of Representatives and emerged as a Federalist leader in Congress. He was appointed secretary of state in 1800 after a cabinet shake-up, becoming an important figure in the Adams administration. In 1801, Adams appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court. Marshall emerged as the key figure on the court, due in large part to his personal influence with the other justices. Under his leadership, the court moved away from seriatim opinions, instead issuing a single majority opinion that elucidated a clear rule; the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison presented the first major case heard by the Marshall Court. In his opinion for the court, Marshall upheld the principle of judicial review, whereby courts could strike down federal and state laws if they conflicted with the Constitution. Marshall's holding avoided direct conflict with the executive branch, led by Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson. By establishing the principle of judicial review while avoiding an inter-branch confrontation, Marshall helped cement the position of the American judiciary as an independent and co-equal branch of government.
After 1803, many of the major decisions issued by the Marshall Court confirmed the supremacy of the federal government and the federal Constitution over the states. In Fletcher v. Peck and Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the court invalidated state actions because they violated the Contract Clause; the court's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland upheld the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States and established the principle that the states could not tax federal institutions; the cases of Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and Cohens v. Virginia established that the Supreme Court could hear appeals from state courts in both civil and criminal matters. Marshall's opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden established that the Commerce Clause bars states from restricting navigation. In the case of Worcester v. Georgia, Marshall held that the federal government had the sole power to deal with Native Americans, he ordered the release of prisoners held by the state of Georgia. President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the order, but his administration avoided a confrontation with the Marshall Court by arranging for the pardon of the prisoners.
Marshall died in 1835, Jackson appointed Roger Taney as his successor. John Marshall was born on September 24, 1755 in a log cabin in Germantown, a rural community on the Virginia frontier, close to present-day near Midland, Fauquier County. In the mid-1760s, the Marshalls moved west to the present-day site of Virginia, his parents were Thomas Marshall and Mary Randolph Keith, the granddaughter of politician Thomas Randolph of Tuckahoe and a first cousin of U. S. President Thomas Jefferson. Despite her ancestry, Mary was shunned by the Randolph family because her mother, Mary Isham Randolph, had eloped with a man believed beneath her station in life. After his death, Mary Isham Randolph married a Scottish minister. Thomas Marshall was employed in Fauquier County as a surveyor and land agent by Lord Fairfax, which provided him with a substantial income. Nonetheless, John Marshall grew up in a two-room log cabin, which he shared with his parents and several siblings. One of his younger brothers, James Markham Marshall, would serve as a federal judge.
Marshall was a first cousin of U. S. Senator Humphrey Marshall. From a young age, Marshall was noted for his good humor and black eyes, which were "strong and penetrating, beaming with intelligence and good nature". With the exception of one year of formal schooling, during which time he befriended future president James Monroe, Marshall did not receive a formal education. Encouraged by his parents, the young Marshall read reading works such as William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, he was tutored by the Reverend James Thomson, a ordained deacon from Glasgow, who resided with the Marshall family in return for his room and board. Marshall was influenced by his father, of whom he wrote, "to his care I am indebted for anything valuable which I may have acquired in my youth, he was my only intelligent companion. Thomas Marshall prospered in his work as a surveyor, in the 1770s he purchased an estate known as Oak Hill. After the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord and John Marshall volunteered for service in the 3rd Virginia Regiment.
In 1776, Marshall became a lieutenant in the Eleventh Vi
Gabriel Duvall
Gabriel Duvall was an American politician and jurist. Duvall was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1811 to 1835, during the Marshall Court and early-Taney Court eras. Duvall was the Comptroller of the Treasury, a Maryland state court judge, a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Maryland, a Maryland state legislator. Whether Duvall is deserving of the title of "the most insignificant" justice in the history of the U. S. Supreme Court has been the subject of much academic interest, most notably a debate between University of Chicago Law Professors David P. Currie and Frank H. Easterbrook in 1983. Currie argued that "impartial examination of Duvall's performance reveals to the uninitiated observer that he achieved an enviable standard of insignificance against which all other justices must be measured." Easterbrook responded that Currie's analysis lacked "serious consideration of candidates so shrouded in obscurity that they escaped proper attention in a contest of insignificance," and concluded that Duvall's colleague, Justice Thomas Todd, was more insignificant.
He was born in Prince George's County, Maryland, as the sixth child of Benjamin Duvall and his wife the former Susanna Tyler, Two of his elder brothers died in the American Revolutionary War. Duvall read law to enter the bar in Prince George's County in 1778, where he practiced at least part-time until 1823, he soon moved to Annapolis, where he practiced in the Mayor's Court as county prosecutor beginning in 1781, in Anne Arundel County court beginning in 1783. Some uncertainty remains over the spelling of Duvall's name. One scholar noted Supreme Court Reporters Cranch and Peters uniformly spelled it "Duvall", but Marshall's biographer, Albert Beveridge, insisted on spelling the name with a single "l." Journalist and Supreme Court specialist Irving Lee Dilliard concluded persuasively that the original "DuVal" or "Duval" employed in earlier generations had become "Duvall" before the future justice was born. Family members used "DuVal". Duval was an Anglican and maintained pews both at St. Anne's Church and his family's longstanding parish in Prince George's County, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Collington a chapel of ease for St. Barnabas' Episcopal Church, Leeland.
He married twice, first in 1787 to daughter of Annapolis captain Robert Bryce. They had a son, Edmund Bryce Duvall, a daughter Polly, born circa 1794, but who did not survive to adulthood and whose birth may have caused Mary Bryce's death, he married his second wife, Jane Gibbon Duvall, daughter of the woman who ran the lodginghouse where he resided in Philadelphia during his federal service, on May 5, 1795 at Christ Church, Philadelphia. Her mother came to live with them during her last years. Duvall was a clerk for the Maryland Council of Safety from 1775 to 1777, for the Maryland House of Delegates from 1777 to 1781, he participated in the American Revolutionary War, first as a Mustermaster and commissary of stores in 1776 as a private in the Maryland militia, where he fought in the Battle of Brandywine. He was a Commissioner to preserve confiscated British property from 1781 to 1782 a member of Maryland Governor's Council from 1782 to 1785, he was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates, serving there from 1787 to 1794.
He served one term as a U. S. Representative from the second district of Maryland, from November 11, 1794, to March 28, 1796, he was Chief Justice of the Maryland General Court from 1796 to 1802, was the first U. S. Comptroller of the Treasury from 1802 to 1811. On November 15, 1811, Duvall was nominated by President James Madison to an Associate Justice seat on the Supreme Court of the United States vacated by fellow Marylander Samuel Chase. Duvall was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 18, 1811, received his commission the same day. In the 23 years he sat on the Supreme Court, Duvall penned an opinion in only 18 cases: 15 majority opinions, two concurrence, one dissent; the Court during this time was a vehicle for Chief Justice John Marshall's belief in a strong Federal government and the associate justices dissented, with Marshall himself writing the large majority of opinions. The one time when Duvall dissented was in the case of Mima Queen and Child vs. Hepburn where he was the sole dissenting justice in a case that ruled whether the daughter of an ex-slave could provide hearsay evidence that her mother was free at the time of her birth.
Duvall wrote that the evidence should be allowed, "people of color from their helpless condition under the uncontrolled authority of a master, are entitled to all reasonable protection."He remained on the court until January 12, 1835, when he retired a month after his 82nd birthday. According to one of Chief Justice Marshall's biographers, Duvall "became distinguished for holding on to his seat for many years after he had become aged and infirm because he was fearful of who would replace him, thus inaugurating what has become a popular tradition for subsequent Supreme Court Justices." According to his biographer, Irving Dillard, in his last few years on the Court, Duvall was "so deaf as to be unable to participate in conversation." Prof. Currie retorts that: "There is no proof... that Duvall was either deaf or unable to speak while on the Court". In his 24 years on the Court, Duvall authored 15 majority op
LexisNexis
LexisNexis Group is a corporation providing computer-assisted legal research as well as business research and risk management services. During the 1970s, LexisNexis pioneered the electronic accessibility of legal and journalistic documents; as of 2006, the company has the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records related information. LexisNexis is owned by RELX Group; the story of LexisNexis starts in western Pennsylvania in 1956, when attorney John Horty began to explore the use of CALR technology in support of his work on comparative hospital law at the University of Pittsburgh Health Law Center. In 1965, Horty's pioneering work inspired the Ohio State Bar Association to develop its own separate CALR system, Ohio Bar Automated Research. In 1967, the OSBA signed a contract with Data Corporation, a local defense contractor, to build OBAR based on the OSBA's written specifications. Data proceeded to implement OBAR on Data Central, an interactive full-text search system developed in 1964 as Recon Central to help U.
S. Air Force intelligence analysts search text summaries of the contents of aerial and satellite reconnaissance photographs. In 1968, paper manufacturer Mead Corporation purchased Data Corporation for $6 million to gain control of its inkjet printing technology. Mead hired the Arthur D. Little firm to study the business possibilities for the Data Central technology. Arthur D. Little dispatched a team of consultants to Ohio led by H. Donald Wilson. Mead asked for a practicing lawyer on the team, so the team included Jerome Rubin, a Harvard-trained attorney with 20 years of experience; the resulting study concluded that the nonlegal market was nonexistent, the legal market had potential, OBAR needed to be rebuilt to profitably exploit that market. At the time, OBAR searches took up to five hours to complete if more than one user was online, its original terminals were noisy Teletypes with slow transmission rates of 10 characters per second. OBAR had quality control issues. Wilson and Rubin were installed as president and vice president.
A year Mead bought out the OSBA's interests in the OBAR project, OBAR disappears from the historical record after that point. Wilson was reluctant to implement his own study's recommendation to abandon the OBAR/Data Central work to date and start over. In September 1971, Mead relegated Wilson to vice chairman of the board and elevated Rubin to president of MDC. Rubin promptly pushed the legacy Data Central technology back to Mead Corporation. Under a newly organized division, Mead Technical Laboratories, Data Central continued to operate as a service bureau for nonlegal applications until 1980. With that out of the way, Rubin hired a new team to build from scratch an new information service dedicated to legal research, he coined a new name: LEXIS, from “lex,” the Latin word for law, “IS” for “information service.” After several iterations, the original functional and performance specifications were finalized by Rubin and executive vice president Bob Bennett by the late summer of 1972. System designer Edward Gottsman supervised the implementation of the specifications as working computer code.
At the same time and Bennett orchestrated the necessary keyboarding of the legal materials to be provided through LEXIS, designed a business plan, marketing strategy, training program. MDC's corporate headquarters were moved to New York City, while the data center stayed in Dayton, Ohio. According to Trudi Bellardo Hahn and Charles P. Bourne, LEXIS was the first of the early information services to realize the vision of a future in which large populations of end users would directly interact with computer databases, rather than going through professional intermediaries like librarians. Other early information services in the 1970s crashed into financial and technological constraints and were forced to retreat to the professional intermediary model until the early 1990s. Rubin explained that they were trying “to crack the librarian barrier. Our goal was to get a LEXIS terminal on every lawyer’s desk.” To persuade American lawyers to use LEXIS, MDC targeted them with aggressive marketing and training campaigns.
On April 2, 1973, MDC publicly launched LEXIS at a press conference in New York City, with libraries of New York and Ohio case law as well as a separate library of federal tax materials. By the end of that year, the LEXIS database had reached two billion characters in size and had added the entire United States Code, as well as the United States Reports from 1938 through 1973. By 1974, LEXIS was running on an IBM 370/155 computer in Ohio supported by a set of IBM 3330 disk storage units which could store up to about 4 billion characters, its communications processor could handle 62 terminals with transmission speed at 120 characters per second per user. On this platform, LEXIS was able to execute over 90% of searches within less than five seconds. Over 100 text terminals had been deployed to various legal offices and there were over 4,000 trained LEXIS users. By 1975, the LEXIS database had grown to 5 billion characters and it could handle up to 200 terminals simultaneously. By 1976, the LEXIS database included case law from six states, plus various federal materials.
MDC turned a profit for the first time in 1977. In 1980, LEXIS completed
Henry Wheaton
Henry Wheaton was a United States lawyer and diplomat. He was the third reporter of decisions for the United States Supreme Court, first U. S. minister to Denmark and U. S. minister to Prussia. He was born at Rhode Island, he graduated from Brown University in 1802, was admitted to the bar in 1805, after two years' study abroad in Poictiers and London, practiced law at Providence and at New York City. From 1812 to 1815, he edited the organ of the administration party. There he published notable articles on the question of neutral rights in connection with the existing war with England. On 26 October 1814, he became division judge advocate of the army, he was a justice of the Marine Court of New York City from 1815 to 1819. From 1816 to 1827, he edited reports of the Supreme Court. Aided by Justice Joseph Story, his reports were known for their comprehensive notes and summaries of the arguments presented by each side. However, the volumes were costly. Wheaton's successor Richard Peters condensed his work, Wheaton sued him, claiming infringement of his common-law copyright.
The Supreme Court rejected his claim in Wheaton v. Peters, the Court's first copyright case, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1820. He was elected a member of the convention to form a new constitution for New York in 1821, was a member of the New York State Assembly in 1824, in 1825 was associated with John Duer and Benjamin F. Butler in a commission to revise the statute law of New York, he took part in important cases, was the sole associate of Daniel Webster in that which settled the limits of the state and federal legislation in reference to bankruptcy and insolvency. In 1825, he aided in the revision of the laws of New York, his diplomatic career began with an appointment to Denmark as chargé d'affaires. He served until 1835, displaying skill in the settlement of the sound dues that were imposed by Denmark on the vessels of all countries, obtained modifications of the quarantine regulations, he was noted for his research into the Scandinavian language and literature, was elected a member of Scandinavian and Icelandic societies.
In 1835 he was appointed minister to Prussia, being promoted to minister plenipotentiary in 1837. He soon received full power to conclude a treaty with the Zollverein, which object he pursued for the ensuing six years. On 25 March 1844, he signed a treaty with Germany, for which he received high commendation from President Tyler and John C. Calhoun, the secretary of state; this was rejected by the U. S. Senate, but served as the basis for subsequent treaties, he was made a corresponding member of the French Institute in 1843, a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin in 1846. Other issues Wheaton dealt with during his diplomatic career were Scheldt dues, the tolls on the Elbe, the rights of naturalized citizens. In 1846 Wheaton was requested to resign as Prussian minister by the new president, who needed his place for another appointment; the request provoked general condemnation. He was called at once to Harvard Law School as lecturer on international law, but illness prevented his acceptance, he died at Dorchester, Massachusetts, on 11 March 1848.
Wheaton's general theory is that international law consists of "those rules of conduct which reason deduces, as consonant to justice, from the nature of the society existing among independent nations, with such definitions and modifications as may be established by general consent." Digest of the Law of Maritime Captures Supreme Court Reports A Digest of the Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States from Its Establishment in 1789 to 1820 Life of William Pinkney, which he abridged for publication in Sparks's "American Biography" series History of the Northmen, or Danes and Normans, from the Earliest Times to the Conquest of England by William of Normandy London: J. Murray, 1831 at Internet Archive, which Washington Irving said "evinced throughout the enthusiasm of an antiquarian, the liberality of a scholar, the enlightened toleration of a citizen of the world" Elements of International Law; this is his most important work, of which a 6th edition with the last corrections of the author and a memoir was prepared by William Beach Lawrence and an 8th by Richard Henry Dana, Jr..
The contents of the 8th edition were the source of controversy between Dana. History of Scandinavia, with Andrew Crichton A sequel to History of the Northmen. Histoire du progrès des gens en Europe depuis la paix de Westphalie jusqu'au congres de Vienne, avec un précis historique du droit des gens européens avant la paix de Westphalie, written in 1838 for a prize offered by the French Academy of Moral and Political Science, translated in 1845 by W. B. Lawrence as A History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America, New York: Gould, Banks & Co.. The History took rank at once as one of the leading works on the subject. An Enquiry into the Validity of the British Claim to a Right of Visitation and Search of American Vessels suspected to be engaged in the Slave Trade Wheaton translated the Code of Napoleon, but the manuscript was destroyed by fire, he contributed numerous political and literary articles to the North American Review and other periodicals. Gilman, D. C.. "Wheaton, Hen
Henry Brockholst Livingston
Henry Brockholst Livingston was an American Revolutionary War officer, a justice of the New York Court of Appeals and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Livingston was born in New York City in 1757 to William Livingston, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the College of New Jersey in 1774. Livingston inherited the family estate in New Jersey, Liberty Hall, retained it until 1798. During the American Revolutionary War, he was a lieutenant colonel of the New York Line, serving on the staff of General Philip Schuyler from 1775 to 1777 and as an aide-de-camp to then-Major General Benedict Arnold at the Battle of Saratoga, he was a private secretary to John Jay the U. S. Minister to Spain from 1779 to 1782. Livingston was imprisoned by the British in New York in 1782. After the war, Livingston read law and was admitted to the bar in 1783, he was in private practice in New York City from 1783 to 1802. Livingston served as one of three defense attorneys, alongside Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, in the trial of Levi Weeks for the murder of Elma Sands.
From 1802 to 1807, Livingston served as a justice of the Supreme Court of New York, where he authored a famous dissent in the 1805 case of Pierson v. Post. Two years on November 10, 1806, Livingston received a recess appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States from Thomas Jefferson, to a seat vacated by William Paterson. Formally nominated on December 15, 1806 as Jefferson's second nominee, Livingston was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 17, 1806, received his commission on January 16, 1807, he served on the Supreme Court from until his death in 1823. During his Supreme Court tenure, Livingston's votes and opinions followed the lead of Chief Justice John Marshall. In that era, Supreme Court Justices were required to ride a circuit. Prior to his appointment to the U. S. Supreme Court, Livingston served as a judge for the State Supreme Court of New York, a member of the New York State Assembly, an immensely prominent political activist. Due to family ties, Livingston's allegiance to the Democratic-Republican party soon faded.
Livingston rebelled and goaded the Federalists to an enormous extent. With members consisting of Aaron Burr, Robert R. Livingston, Edward Livingston, Livingston became one of the few emerging from a compact political faction in New York to form an alliance with Jefferson's supporters in Virginia; this became known as the Virginia-New York alliance, which proved to be vital in Jefferson's 1800–1801 election. Livingston was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814. Livingston died in Washington, D. C, his remains are interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in New York. Livingston's paternal uncles were Robert Livingston, Peter Van Brugh Livingston, Philip Livingston, his paternal grandparents were Philip Livingston, the 2nd Lord of Livingston Manor, Catherine Van Brugh, the only child of Albany mayor Pieter Van Brugh, his sister, Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, married John Jay, a diplomat, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, signatory of the Treaty of Paris, the second Governor of New York, the first Chief Justice of the United States, in 1774.
Another sister, Susannah Livingston, married John Cleves Symmes, a delegate to the Continental Congress from New Jersey, a pioneer in the Northwest Territory. Her stepdaughter Anna Symmes, Symmes' daughter from a previous marriage, married eventual President William Henry Harrison, was the grandmother of President Benjamin Harrison. Livingston married three times, he first married Catherine Keteltas, the daughter of Peter Keteltas and Elizabeth Van Zandt, on December 2, 1784. He and Catherine were the parents of: Eliza Livingston, who married Jasper Hall Livingston, the son of Philip Philip Livingston Susan French Livingston, who married Benjamin Ledyard. Catherine Augusta Livingston, who married Archibald McVicker Robert C. Livingston After his first wife's death in 1804, he married Ann N. Ludlow, the daughter of Gabriel Henry Ludlow and Ann Williams. Together, they were the parents of: Carroll Livingston. Anson Livingston, who married Anne Greenleaf Livingston, daughter of Henry Walter Livingston After his second wife's death in 1815, he married Catherine Seaman, the daughter of Edward Seaman and the widow of Capt.
John Kortright. Together and Catherine were the parents of: Jasper Hall Livingston, a twin, who married Matilda Anne Cecila Morris, the youngest daughter of Sir John Morris, 2nd Baronet of Clasemont, in 1851. Catherine Louise Livingston, a twin, who married Maurice Power, an Irish MP for County Cork who served as Lieutenant Governor for St. Lucia. Henry Brockholst Livingston, who married Marianna Gribaldo, resided in Italy. Through his daughter Eliza, he was the great-grandfather of Edwin Brockholst Livingston, a historian. Through his daughter, Susan, he was the grandfather of Henry Brockholst Ledyard and great-grandfather of Lewis Cass Ledyard. Through his daughter, Catherine McVicker, he was the grandfather of Brockholst McVicker and Archibald McVicker. Through his daughter, Catherine Power, he was
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