398 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. The Court, in its opinion, went with them to a certain point, but no farther. Marshall declared that these inhabitants, though made by the treaty of cession citizens of the United States, acquired no right to share in poUtical power; and also that the provision of the Constitution that the judicial power of the United States should be vested in courts of a certain description did not apply to such courts as Congress had provided for Florida. His argument on this, the turning-point of the case, was hardly worthy of so great a judge. The Constitution, he said, required that the Judges of the courts which it contemplated should hold office for good behavior. The Act of Congress for the government of the Terri- tory of Florida set up courts, the Judges of which were to hold office only for four years. Therefore the Constitution did not apply to them. What were they, then? Legislative courts, not exercising any of the judicial power conferred by the people in the grant made and defined in the third article of the Constitution, but having a jurisdiction "conferred by Congress in the execution of those general powers, which that body possesses over the terri- tories of the United States." . . . "In legislating for them. Con- gress exercises the combined powers of the general and of a State government." The other legislative powers granted by the people, so far at least as the express terms of the Constitution are concerned, are either limited in scope or else confined to some narrow field of operation. The right to regulate the territories, so far as may be "needful," is given with no other definition of its bounds; and who but Con- gress is to say how far that need extends? As to them, Congress has, and it was meant by Morris that it should have,^ every power incident to an independent sovereignty, unless limitations are to be read into the grant from its collocation, and by force of the funda- mental principles on which the whole Constitution rests, or of certain of its general prohibitions and guaranties. The judicial powers granted to the courts of the United States are carefully enumerated, and cover comparatively few of the ordi- nary controversies that become the subject of litigation. Those which Congress can put in the hands of its deputies for the terri- tories extend over the whole domain of jurisprudence. The executive power of the United States alone stands as to the Territories on the same footing which it occupies as respects the
- Scott V. Sandford, 19 Howard, 507.
