Missouri v. Holland

Facts

Previously, Congress had passed laws regulating the hunting of migratory waterfowl on the basis that such birds naturally migrated across state and international borders freely, and hence the regulation of the harvest of such birds could not realistically be considered to be province solely of individual states or groups of states. However, several states objected to this theory and successfully sued to have the law declared unconstitutional, on the premise that the United States Constitution gave Congress no enumerated power to regulate migratory bird hunting, and hence the regulation of such hunting, if there was to be any, was the province of the states according to the Tenth Amendment.

Congress, disgruntled with this ruling, then empowered the State Department to negotiate with the United Kingdom, which at the time still largely handled the foreign relations of Canada, a treaty pertaining to this issue. The treaty was subsequently ratified and came into force, and required the Federal Government to enact laws regulating the capturing, killing, or selling of protected migratory birds, an obligation that it fulfilled in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The state of Missouri then sued on the basis that the federal government had no authority to negotiate a treaty on this topic.

Judgment

In an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Supreme Court held that protection of a State's quasi-sovereign right to regulate the taking of game is a sufficient jurisdictional basis, apart from any pecuniary interest, for a bill by that State to enjoin enforcement of federal regulations over the subject alleged to be unconstitutional. However, the Supreme Court held that the law at issue was in fact constitutional, noting that the treaties clause of the Constitution (Article VI, clause 2), sometimes known as the "supremacy clause," makes treaties the "supreme law of the land," a finding that trumps any state-level concerns with regard to the provisions of any treaty, and further implying that treaty provisions were not subject to questioning by the states under the process of judicial review. In the course of his judgment, Holmes made this remark on the nature of the constitution:

With regard to that we may add that when we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago. The treaty in question does not contravene any prohibitory words to be found in the Constitution. The only question is whether [252 U.S. 416, 434] it is forbidden by some invisible radiation from the general terms of the Tenth Amendment. We must consider what this country has become in deciding what that amendment has reserved.

Reception

Many persons saw and still see this ruling to imply that Congress and the President can essentially amend the Constitution by means of treaties with other countries. These concerns came to a head in the 1950s with the Bricker Amendment, a series of proposed amendments which would have placed restrictions on the scope and ratification of treaties and executive agreements entered into by the United States. More recently, a similar provision has been proposed as the fourth article of the Bill of Federalism, a list of ten proposed amendments drafted by law professor Randy Barnett.

Thomas Healy has suggested that Missouri may not even be 'good law' - meaning that more recent decisions could be seen to overturn Missouri, and establish new limits on the Treaty power.