Chisholm v. Georgia

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

Page 375

An early U.S. Supreme Court case holding that Article III of the federal Constitution gives the Court original jurisdiction over lawsuits between a state government and the citizens of another state, even if the state being sued does not consent. The decision generated immediate opposition from 12 states and led to the ratification of the ELEVENTH AMENDMENT, which gives states SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY from being sued in federal court by citizens of other states without the consent of the state being sued.

In 1777, Robert Farquhar, a Charleston, South Carolina, merchant, sold goods to the Georgia army for use in the Revolutionary War. The next year Farquhar died, and in 1791, his executor, Alexander Chisholm, brought suit to collect the debt in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Georgia. Plaintiffs sought 100,000 pounds in sterling silver for payment of the debt plus interest. Notably, Associate Justice JAMES IREDELL, who later filed the famous dissenting opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Chisholm v. Georgia, heard the arguments at the district court level while discharging his duties as a traveling circuit judge (in the early days of the U.S. Supreme Court, justices performed the double duty of deciding cases for the nation's highest court and riding circuit to hear cases in the particular jurisdictions they were assigned).

In his opinion for the circuit court, Iredell dismissed the suit for want of jurisdiction. If any court had jurisdiction over the dispute, Iredell said, it was the U.S. Supreme Court because Article III of the federal Constitution gave only the Supreme Court original jurisdiction over all cases in which a state is named as a party."It may fairly be presumed," Iredell wrote for the circuit court, "that the several States thought it important to stipulate that so awful and important a Trial [to which a State is party] should not be cognizable by any Court but the Supreme." Iredell's conclusion was not challenged when the Supreme Court heard Chisholm under its original jurisdiction.

One reason Iredell's lower court decision was not challenged in the Supreme Court is that Georgia would likely have been the only party objecting to it, and Georgia refused to appear before the nation's high court after Chisholm refiled his lawsuit there. Georgia feared that by making an appearance at trial, the Supreme Court would deem that appearance consent to the Court's...