Ryan C. Williams, Brooklyn Law School, has posted Murray's Lessee, Non-Article III Adjudication, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which is forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review:
Murray’s Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co. is a cornerstone of both modern federal-courts doctrine and the modern administrative state. In upholding a statute allowing Treasury officials to seize and sell a federal tax collector’s private property for payment of debts he allegedly owed to the government, the Supreme Court introduced a distinction between disputes that only an Article III court may resolve, and “matters, involving public rights,” which Congress may permissibly assign to either the Article III courts or to some other federal decision-maker. This holding forms the bedrock of the modern “public rights” doctrine, which undergirds a vast domain of federal adjudication that takes place outside the Article III courts. But the proper interpretation of Murray’s Lessee has long been a subject of controversy, which has contributed to persisting confusion regarding the scope and limits of the so-called “public rights exception” to Article III.
Fugitive Slaves Fleeing Captors (NYPL)
This Article sheds new light on Murray’s Lessee and the public-rights doctrine by highlighting a heretofore under-appreciated connection between the Court’s decision in that case and the contemporaneous debates about the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Enacted by Congress to bolster legal protections for slaveholders, the Fugitive Slave Act empowered non-Article III federal “commissioners” to conduct summary hearings to determine whether accused fugitives could be lawfully taken from a free state and delivered into slavery. The commissioners’ rulings were effectively final and unreviewable by any other court, sparking vigorous objections from abolitionists that the statute violated Article III. In response to such objections, northern jurists sympathetic to the policy goals of the 1850 Act—including Justice Benjamin Curtis, the author of Murray’s Lessee—strained to rationalize the new arrangements with the language of Article III. They did so by emphasizing, and to some extent, exaggerating the ambiguities inherent in American understandings of “judicial power.”
Murray’s Lessee, which was decided six years after the Fugitive Slave Act’s enactment, confronted the Court with a set of constitutional questions that were remarkably similar to those at the center of the Fugitive Slave Act controversy. Justice Curtis’s opinion for the Court echoed many of the rhetorical strategies employed in the Fugitive Slave Act cases, emphasizing the uncertain boundary between judicial and executive responsibilities while remaining deliberately vague about where that boundary lay. This rhetoric differed sharply from that reflected in cases decided just a few decades earlier, including in cases addressing constitutional challenges to the same federal statute that the Court upheld in Murray’s Lessee. Recovering this history clarifies many otherwise difficult-to-explain features of Justice Curtis’s opinion, which may, in turn, help to illuminate the historical foundations of the modern public-rights doctrine.
--Dan Ernst
