Appellant
Frank W. McAllister, Attorney General of Missouri
Appellee
Ray P. Holland
Appellant's Claim
That federal laws pursuant to the Migratory Bird Act and enforcement thereofwere an invasion of sovereign states rights as set forth in the Tenth Amendment.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Alexander C. King, Solicitor General; William L. Frierson, Assistant AttorneyGeneral
Chief Lawyers for Appellee
John T. Gose, J. Harvey
Justices for the Court
Louis D. Brandeis, John Hessin Clarke, William Rufus Day, Oliver Wendell Holmes (writing for the Court), Joseph McKenna, James Clark McReynolds, Edward Douglass White
Justices Dissenting
Mahlon Pitney, Willis Van Devanter
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
19 April 1920
Decision
The Court ruled in favor of Holland, upholding the U.S. government's treaty and its relevant statutes.
Significance
By affirming Congress' right to make treaties whose terms might supercede state laws, the Court established one of the first wildlife protection laws.
Bird Protection and Treaty-Making
Legislative controls for the protection of wildlife were rare during the 1800s. The few existing laws were state laws, not federal regulations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the decimation of bird species through careless hunting practices and wholesale slaughter for items like feathers used in the feminine millinery industry produced growing pressure for somekind of control.
On 16 August 1916, the United States and Great Britain (acting on behalf of its colony, Canada) signed a treaty recognizing migratory birds as an international food resource and as ecologically important consumers of vegetation-destroying insects. When the U.S. Congress ratified the treaty by passing the Migratory Bird Act on 3 July 1918, it became a federal offense to capture, kill, or sell migratory bird species named in the treaty. Regulations formulatedby the secretary of agriculture prohibited spring shooting, set bag limits onducks and geese, and permanently forbade the hunting of certain nongame species. The act was backed by politically influential hunters, who were generally comfortable with the modest new controls.
Yet the government of the state of Missouri, which lies on the bird migrationroute between Canada and the United States, challenged the new law. The state, whose hunting season was four months longer than the new federal law allowed, saw the treaty as an invasion of its sovereign rights. When U.S. game warden Ray P. Holland arrested Missouri Attorney General Frank McAllister for shooting ducks out of season, the legal confrontation between the two men's bosses began. The state sued Holland to prevent him from enforcing the MigratoryBird Act and its regulations, implicitly challenging his employer, the federal government.
Rather than challenge specific regulations, the state attempted to scrap allof the new laws by declaring the entire treaty unconstitutional. The Tenth Amendment states that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Missouri argued that all birds found within its borders were essentially the property of the state and thus subject to state, not federal, control. By this rationale, the treaty and its enforcement provisions were an unconstitutional interference with Missouri's rights as a state.
This argument proved to be unsuccessful. A U.S. district court in Missouri ruled that while the enforcement provisions of the act would have been unconstitutional if the treaty did not exist, passage of the treaty validated federalcontrol. The state appealed this decision before the Supreme Court on 2 March 1920.
The Ownership of Nature
The U.S. government's position included a list of 23 bird species threatenedwith extinction by the contemporary habits of sport hunters, some of whom boasted of killing as many as 10,000 birds in one night. Yet the case heard by the Court had become less about bird life than about states rights and the power of the U.S. government to make treaties. The state of Kansas filed a brief, supporting Missouri's position. Only six weeks after hearing arguments, however, on 19 April 1920, the Court ruled in favor of the federal government.
The majority opinion written by Justice Holmes reflected that the Court had focused on the Tenth Amendment in reaching a decision. Holmes noted that earlier congressional attempts to protect bird life by passing laws had been foundunconstitutional. Congress had no right to displace state statutes, including those based on the assumption that migratory birds were the property of theindividual sovereign states and their citizens. State law, however, could not supercede international agreements made by Congress in important matters ofnational interest. With Holmes citing a long-established tradition of treaties whose terms were observed by both the states and the nation as a whole, the Court affirmed Congress' right to enact legislation by implementing treaties.
Holmes stated that migratory birds were in fact "owned" by no one, much lessby states whose territory the birds crossed while in transit. Without the protections offered by the treaty, Holmes noted, there might not be any birds for either the states or the U.S. government to regulate. "We see nothing in the Constitution that compels the Government to sit by while a food supply is cut off and the protectors of our forests and our crops are destroyed," Holmeswrote. If the states could have been relied upon to protect the wildlife, headded, the case would never have come to court.
Justices Van Devanter and Pitney dissented from the majority opinion, but through the Court's affirmation of Congress' power to enact legislation throughtreaties, the Migratory Bird Act survived. Proponents of states' rights continued to cite the State of Missouri v. Holland decision as an abuse offederal power, through which the will of state governments was unjustly bypassed. The successful defense of the Migratory Bird Act, however, remains a historical landmark among laws which protect wildlife in the national interest.
Related Cases
The Migratory Bird Treaty
The National Wildlife Refuge System of the United States is an outgrowth of environmental concerns elicited by the rapid disappearance of bird species such as the tern, the egret, and the heron during the late nineteenth century. The Committee for the Protection of North American Birds of the American Ornithologists' Union urged President Theodore Roosevelt to take action. In 1903,he established the nation's first bird refuge at Pelican Island Reservation in Florida. Under Roosevelt's administration, the refuge system for wildlife expanded. In 1908, Congress initiated the purchase of a bison range in Montana, and by 1930 the federal government owned some 5 million acres of wildlife-refuge land, on which it operated 86 refuges.
As part of this push toward environmental awareness, the United States in 1916 signed the Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada. The treaty established the importance of protecting species flying back and forth between countries and set up a foundation whereby the federal government would manage and maintain migratory wildlife. This was followed by the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of1929 and the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934.
Sources
Eblen, Ruth A. and William R. Eblen, eds. The Encyclopedia of the Environment Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Frank W. McAllister, Attorney General of Missouri
Appellee
Ray P. Holland
Appellant's Claim
That federal laws pursuant to the Migratory Bird Act and enforcement thereofwere an invasion of sovereign states rights as set forth in the Tenth Amendment.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Alexander C. King, Solicitor General; William L. Frierson, Assistant AttorneyGeneral
Chief Lawyers for Appellee
John T. Gose, J. Harvey
Justices for the Court
Louis D. Brandeis, John Hessin Clarke, William Rufus Day, Oliver Wendell Holmes (writing for the Court), Joseph McKenna, James Clark McReynolds, Edward Douglass White
Justices Dissenting
Mahlon Pitney, Willis Van Devanter
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
19 April 1920
Decision
The Court ruled in favor of Holland, upholding the U.S. government's treaty and its relevant statutes.
Significance
By affirming Congress' right to make treaties whose terms might supercede state laws, the Court established one of the first wildlife protection laws.
Bird Protection and Treaty-Making
Legislative controls for the protection of wildlife were rare during the 1800s. The few existing laws were state laws, not federal regulations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the decimation of bird species through careless hunting practices and wholesale slaughter for items like feathers used in the feminine millinery industry produced growing pressure for somekind of control.
On 16 August 1916, the United States and Great Britain (acting on behalf of its colony, Canada) signed a treaty recognizing migratory birds as an international food resource and as ecologically important consumers of vegetation-destroying insects. When the U.S. Congress ratified the treaty by passing the Migratory Bird Act on 3 July 1918, it became a federal offense to capture, kill, or sell migratory bird species named in the treaty. Regulations formulatedby the secretary of agriculture prohibited spring shooting, set bag limits onducks and geese, and permanently forbade the hunting of certain nongame species. The act was backed by politically influential hunters, who were generally comfortable with the modest new controls.
Yet the government of the state of Missouri, which lies on the bird migrationroute between Canada and the United States, challenged the new law. The state, whose hunting season was four months longer than the new federal law allowed, saw the treaty as an invasion of its sovereign rights. When U.S. game warden Ray P. Holland arrested Missouri Attorney General Frank McAllister for shooting ducks out of season, the legal confrontation between the two men's bosses began. The state sued Holland to prevent him from enforcing the MigratoryBird Act and its regulations, implicitly challenging his employer, the federal government.
Rather than challenge specific regulations, the state attempted to scrap allof the new laws by declaring the entire treaty unconstitutional. The Tenth Amendment states that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Missouri argued that all birds found within its borders were essentially the property of the state and thus subject to state, not federal, control. By this rationale, the treaty and its enforcement provisions were an unconstitutional interference with Missouri's rights as a state.
This argument proved to be unsuccessful. A U.S. district court in Missouri ruled that while the enforcement provisions of the act would have been unconstitutional if the treaty did not exist, passage of the treaty validated federalcontrol. The state appealed this decision before the Supreme Court on 2 March 1920.
The Ownership of Nature
The U.S. government's position included a list of 23 bird species threatenedwith extinction by the contemporary habits of sport hunters, some of whom boasted of killing as many as 10,000 birds in one night. Yet the case heard by the Court had become less about bird life than about states rights and the power of the U.S. government to make treaties. The state of Kansas filed a brief, supporting Missouri's position. Only six weeks after hearing arguments, however, on 19 April 1920, the Court ruled in favor of the federal government.
The majority opinion written by Justice Holmes reflected that the Court had focused on the Tenth Amendment in reaching a decision. Holmes noted that earlier congressional attempts to protect bird life by passing laws had been foundunconstitutional. Congress had no right to displace state statutes, including those based on the assumption that migratory birds were the property of theindividual sovereign states and their citizens. State law, however, could not supercede international agreements made by Congress in important matters ofnational interest. With Holmes citing a long-established tradition of treaties whose terms were observed by both the states and the nation as a whole, the Court affirmed Congress' right to enact legislation by implementing treaties.
Holmes stated that migratory birds were in fact "owned" by no one, much lessby states whose territory the birds crossed while in transit. Without the protections offered by the treaty, Holmes noted, there might not be any birds for either the states or the U.S. government to regulate. "We see nothing in the Constitution that compels the Government to sit by while a food supply is cut off and the protectors of our forests and our crops are destroyed," Holmeswrote. If the states could have been relied upon to protect the wildlife, headded, the case would never have come to court.
Justices Van Devanter and Pitney dissented from the majority opinion, but through the Court's affirmation of Congress' power to enact legislation throughtreaties, the Migratory Bird Act survived. Proponents of states' rights continued to cite the State of Missouri v. Holland decision as an abuse offederal power, through which the will of state governments was unjustly bypassed. The successful defense of the Migratory Bird Act, however, remains a historical landmark among laws which protect wildlife in the national interest.
Related Cases
- Baldwin v. Franks, 120 U.S. 678 (1887).
- Baldwin v. Montana Fish and Game Commission, 430 U.S. 371 (1978).
The Migratory Bird Treaty
The National Wildlife Refuge System of the United States is an outgrowth of environmental concerns elicited by the rapid disappearance of bird species such as the tern, the egret, and the heron during the late nineteenth century. The Committee for the Protection of North American Birds of the American Ornithologists' Union urged President Theodore Roosevelt to take action. In 1903,he established the nation's first bird refuge at Pelican Island Reservation in Florida. Under Roosevelt's administration, the refuge system for wildlife expanded. In 1908, Congress initiated the purchase of a bison range in Montana, and by 1930 the federal government owned some 5 million acres of wildlife-refuge land, on which it operated 86 refuges.
As part of this push toward environmental awareness, the United States in 1916 signed the Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada. The treaty established the importance of protecting species flying back and forth between countries and set up a foundation whereby the federal government would manage and maintain migratory wildlife. This was followed by the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of1929 and the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934.
Sources
Eblen, Ruth A. and William R. Eblen, eds. The Encyclopedia of the Environment Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
User Comments Add a comment…