United States V. Wheeler - Decision

Decision

Chief Justice Edward Douglass White wrote the opinion for the 8-1 majority, in which the judgment of the district court was affirmed. Associate Justice John Hessin Clarke dissented, but wrote no opinion.

White opened the majority's decision by reviewing at length the four indictments and briefly describing the ruling of the federal district court. Then, in a section widely quoted in American jurisprudence for the next century, White described the fundamental right which was at issue:

In all the States from the beginning down to the adoption of the Articles of Confederation the citizens thereof possessed the fundamental right, inherent in citizens of all free governments, peacefully to dwell within the limits of their respective States, to move at will from place to place therein, and to have free ingress thereto and egress therefrom, with a consequent authority in the States to forbid and punish violations of this fundamental right.

White next outlined the history of the "privileges and immunities" clause of Article IV, Sec. 2, of the Constitution. In the space of less than one sentence, White came to the landmark conclusion that only the states had enforcement authority over the "privileges and immunities" mentioned in Article IV. The "privileges and immunity" clause, White wrote, was a linear descendent of a similar if limited clause in the Articles of Confederation. " Constitution plainly intended to preserve and enforce the limitation..." White reasoned, and thus "the continued possession by the States of the reserved power to deal with free residence, ingress and egress, cannot be denied."

The principle of comity enshrined in Art. IV, Sec. 2, is one of the most fundamental principles in the Constitution, White claimed. It was, he asserted, the very basis for the Union. The right encompassed not only travel between the separate states but also movement within a state, but while the Constitution fused these two rights into one, it reserved exclusively to the states the power to enforce these rights, except when a state violated the rule of comity.

Relying exclusively on the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) and United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883), White noted that Art. IV, Sec. 2, may be invoked solely when a state actor is involved. White distinguished Crandall v. Nevada, 73 U.S. 35 (1868), by noting that that decision had involved state action.