The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. Lysander Spooner
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_ece1b48b-e26c-5e6f-bddd-a21661887979">[1] It is obvious that legislation can have, in this country, no higher or other authority, than that which results from natural law, and the obligation of contracts: for our constitutions are but contracts, and the legislation they authorize can of course have no other or higher authority than the constitutions themselves. The stream cannot rise higher than the fountain. The idea, therefore, of any inherent authority or sovereignty in our governments, as governments, or of any inherent right in the majority to restrain individuals, by arbitrary enactments, from the exercise of any of their natural rights, is as sheer an imposture as the idea of the divine right of kings to reign, or any other of the doctrines on which arbitrary governments have been founded. And the idea of any necessary or inherent authority in legislation, as such, is, of course, equally an imposture. If legislation be consistent with natural justice, and the natural or intrinsic obligation of the contract of government, it is obligatory: if not, not.
[2] The mass of men are so much accustomed to regard law as an arbitrary command of those who administer political power, that the idea of its being a natural, fixed, and immutable principle, may perhaps want some other support than that of the reasoning already given, to commend it to their adoption. I therefore give them the following corroborations from sources of the highest authority.
"Jurisprudence is the science of what is just and unjust."—Justinian.
"The primary and principal objects of the law are rights and wrongs."—Blackstone.
"Justice is the constant and perpetual disposition to render to every man his due."—Justinian.
"The precepts of the law are to live honestly; to hurt no one; to give to every one his due."—Justinian & Blackstone.
"Law. The rule and bond of men's actions; or it is a rule for the well governing of civil society, to give to every man that which doth belong to him."—Jacob's Law Dictionary.
"Laws are arbitrary or positive, and natural; the last of which are essentially just and good, and bind every where, and in all places where they are observed.* * * * Those which are natural laws, are from God; but those which are arbitrary, are properly human and positive institutions."—Selden on Fortescue, C. 17, also Jacob's Law Dictionary.
"The law of nature is that which God, at man's creation, infused into him, for his preservation and direction; and this is an eternal law, and may not be changed."—2 Shep. Abr. 356, also Jac. Law Dict.
"All laws derive their force from the law of nature; and those which do not, are accounted as no laws."—Fortescue. Jac. Law Dict.
"No law will make a construction to do wrong; and there are some things which the law favors, and some it dislikes; it favoreth those things that come from the order of nature."—1 Inst. 183, 197.—Jac. Law Dict.
"Of law no less can be acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage; the least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power."—Hooker.
"This law of nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original."—Blackstone, Vol. 1, p. 41.
Mr. Christian, one of Blackstone's editors, in a note to the above passage, says:
"Lord Chief Justice Hobart has also advanced, that even an act of Parliament made against natural justice, as to make a man judge in his own cause, is void in itself, for jura naturæ sunt immutabilia, and they are leges legum"—(the laws of nature are immutable—they are the laws of laws.)—Hob. 87.
Mr. Christian then adds:
"With deference to these high authorities, (Blackstone and Hobart,) I should conceive that in no case whatever can a judge oppose his own opinion and authority to the clear will and declaration of the legislature. His province is to interpret and obey the mandates of the supreme power of the state. And if an act of Parliament, if we could suppose such a case, should, like the edict of Herod, command all the children under a certain age to be slain, the judge ought to resign his office rather than be auxiliary to its execution; but it could only be declared void by the same legislative power by which it was ordained. If the judicial power were competent to decide that an act of parliament was void because it was contrary to natural justice, upon an appeal to the House of Lords this inconsistency would be the consequence, that as judges they must declare void, what as legislators they had enacted should be valid.
"The learned judge himself (Blackstone) declares in p. 91, if the Parliament will positively enact a thing to be done which is unreasonable, I know of no power in the ordinary forms of the constitution, that is vested with authority to control it."
It will be seen from this note of Mr. Christian, that he concurs in the opinion that an enactment contrary to natural justice is intrinsically void, and not law; and that the principal, if not the only difficulty, which he sees in carrying out that doctrine, is one that is peculiar to the British constitution, and does not exist in the United States. That difficulty is, the "inconsistency" there would be, if the House of Lords, (which is the highest law court in England, and at the same time one branch of the legislature,) were to declare, in their capacity as judges, that an act was void, which, as legislators, they had declared should be valid. And this is probably the reason why Blackstone admitted that he knew of no power in the ordinary forms of the (British) constitution, that was vested with authority to control an act of parliament that was unreasonable, (against natural justice.) But in the United States, where the judicial and legislative powers are vested in different bodies, and where they are so vested for the very purpose of having the former act as a check upon the latter, no such inconsistency would occur.
The constitutions that have been established in the United States, and the discussions had on the formation of them, all attest the importance which our ancestors attached to a separation of the judicial, from the executive and legislative departments of the government. And yet the benefits, which they had promised to liberty and justice from this separation, have in slight only, if any degree, been realized.—Although the legislation of the country generally has exhibited little less than an entire recklessness both of natural justice and constitutional authority, the records of the judiciary nevertheless furnish hardly an instance where an act of a legislature has, for either of these reasons, been declared void by its co-ordinate judicial department. There have been cases, few and far between, in which the United State's courts have declared acts of state legislatures unconstitutional. But the history of the co-ordinate departments of the same governments has been, that the judicial sanction followed the legislative act with nearly the same unerring certainty, that the shadow follows the substance. Judicial decisions have consequently had the same effects in restraining the actions of legislatures, that shadows have in restraining the motions of bodies.
Why this uniform concurrence of the judiciary with the legislature? It is because the separation between them is nominal, not real. The judiciary receive their offices and salaries at the hands of the executive and the legislature, and are amenable only to the legislature for their official character. They are made entirely independent of the people at large, (whose highest interests are liberty and justice,) and entirely dependent upon those who have too many interests inconsistent with liberty and justice. Could a real and entire separation of the judiciary from the other departments take place, we might then hope that their decisions would, in some measure, restrain the usurpations of the legislature, and promote progress in the science of law and of government.
Whether any of our present judges would, (as Mr. Christian suggests they ought,) "resign their offices" rather than be auxiliary to the execution of an act of legislation, that, like the edict of Herod, should require all the children under a certain age to be slain,