ed to Chancellor Livingston and Robert Fulton for a term
of years to navigate the waters of the State with steam. The validity of
this statute had been maintained by the judges in New York, including
Chancellor Kent, and an injunction had been issued restraining other
persons from running steamboats between Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and
the city of New York, although they were enrolled and licensed as
coasting vessels under the laws of the United States. The Supreme Court,
speaking through Marshall, held the New York statute to be
unconstitutional. By the Constitution of the United States, Congress is
invested with power "to regulate commerce with foreign nations and
among the several States." The term "commerce" Marshall declared to
embrace all the various forms of intercourse, including navigation, and
he affirmed that "wherever commerce among the States goes, the judicial
power of the United States goes to protect it from invasion by State
legislatures."

Mr. Justice Bradley declared that it might truly be said that "the
Constitution received its permanent and final form from judgments
rendered by the Supreme Court during the period in which Marshall was at
its head;" and that, "with a few modifications, superinduced by the
somewhat differing views on two or three points of his great successor,
and aside from the new questions growing out of the Civil War and the
recent constitutional amendments, the decisions made since Marshall's
time have been little more than the applications of principles
established by him and his venerated associates." To the rule that
Marshall's great constitutional opinions continue to be received as
authority, there are, however, a few exceptions, the chief of which is
that delivered in the Dartmouth College Case, the particular point of
which--that acts of incorporation constitute contracts which the State
legislatures can neither alter nor revoke--has been greatly limited by
later decisions, while its effect has been generally obviated by express
reservations of the right of amendment and repeal. With rare exceptions,
however, his constitutional opinions not only remain unshaken, but
continue to form the very warp and woof of the law, and "can scarcely
perish but with the memory of the Constitution itself." Nor should we,
in estimating his achievements, lose sight of the almost uncontested
ascendency which he exercised, in matters of constitutional law, over
the members of the tribunal i