Missouri v. Holland
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| Missouri v. Holland | ||||||||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued February 29, 1918 Decided March 6, 1920 |
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| Holding | ||||||||||||
| Treaties made by the federal government are supreme over any state concerns about such treaties having abrogated any states' rights arising under the Tenth Amendment. | ||||||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Edward Douglass White Associate Justices: Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William R. Day, Charles Evans Hughes, Willis Van Devanter, Joseph Rucker Lamar, Mahlon Pitney, James Clark McReynolds |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||||||
| Majority by: Holmes Joined by: White, McKenna, Day, McReynolds, Brandeis, Clarke Dissent by: Van Devanter Dissent by: Pitney |
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| Laws applied | ||||||||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. X | ||||||||||||
Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920), the United States Supreme Court held that the federal government's ability to make treaties is supreme over any state concerns about such treaties having abrogated any states' rights arising under the Tenth Amendment. The case revolved around the constitutionality of implementing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
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, dissatisfied 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 the protected migratory birds [1], 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. In an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Supreme Court held that the law 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," co-equal in status to the Constitution itself, a finding that trumps any state concern 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.
Many persons saw this ruling as a dangerous implication that Congress or the President could essentially amend the Constitution by the means of treaties with other countries that would abrogate the rights of the people or the States otherwise protected by American law. These concerns came to a head in the 1950s, when the Old Right Conservatives supported the so-called Bricker Amendments, which nearly passed Congress with the required two-thirds majority.
