Decided in the same year as McCulloch v. Maryland, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward is often studied by law students for its interpretation of the Contract Clause and the Court’s ruling that states may not interfere with private contracts. In essence, the state of New Hampshire tried to turn Dartmouth into a public university, receiving public money and with its governing board appointed by the Governor of the state.
It’s also of more recent interest because Dartmouth argued, and prevailed, on the point that private corporations do not need to justify their actions as benefitting the public — even if the government has granted a charter to the entity in the first place. This is so even though there was no body of stockholders to whom profit could be distributed (the concept of a not-for-profit corporation was still in its infancy) and despite the grant of Dartmouth’s charter by the King before the Revolution, thus involving the government. The transaction to create the college was ultimately one amongst private parties to govern what they would do with their money collectively, and the state had no power to interfere with that transaction.
But I’m not going to do this case in detail, because the point about how corporations do not need to justify their actions based on the public interest is the one that’s most interesting to present-day debate to the point that it would overpower any historical insight the case itself might lend, and the point about impairment of contracts (and thus the evolution of U.S. law) was already covered to my satisfaction in Fletcher v. Peck. So I don’t see much clarity to the creation of modern America that will come from an analysis of the case. The fact that the opinion uses my favorite impossible Scrabble word, “eeleosymanary,” is a nice bit of color but insufficient to justify all the work I put in to these things.
Finally, the Court fragmented somewhat in Dartmouth College, with opinions by Justices Marshall, Washington, and Story all reaching the same conclusion but by different routes, which in my mind creates a complexity of legal reasoning that overbalances its impact on our history and culture derived from the case. If you want to read the whole case, by all means do it, for you will profit from doing so.
But for my project, I’ve nearly completed the next case in the series, which comes about five years after McCulloch and Dartmouth. A special shout-out is coming to folks from the Prairie State later this week.
I know of Dartmouth but did not read the case in Law School in either Constitutional Law or Advanced Constitutional Law.
Though we probably read most of the standard set of cases: Marbury, McCullolch, Ollie’s BBQ, Heart of Atlanta, Brown, Roe, and too many others to list.
You have to love this case if for nothing else than Webster’s speech in support of Dartmouth in which he described it as “a small college,” adding, “and yet there are those who love it.”
I was hoping you would have profiled Barron v. Baltimore which I always thought was interesting.