758
Souter, J., concurring in judgment
judiciary's power to strike down legislation that conflicted with important but unenumerated principles of American government. In most such instances, after declaring its power to invalidate what it might find inconsistent with rights of liberty and property, the Court nevertheless went on to uphold the legislative Acts under review. See, e. g., Wilkinson v. Leland, 2 Pet. 627, 656-661 (1829); Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386, 386-395 (1798) (opinion of Chase, J.); see also Corfield v. Coryell, 6 F. Cas. 546, 550-552 (No. 3,230) (CC ED Pa. 1823). But in Fletcher v. Peck, 6 Cranch 87 (1810), the Court went further. It struck down an Act of the Georgia Legislature that purported to rescind a sale of public land ab initio and reclaim title for the State, and so deprive subsequent, good-faith purchasers of property conveyed by the original grantees. The Court rested the invalidation on alternative sources of authority: the specific prohibitions against bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, laws impairing contracts in Article I, § 10, of the Constitution; and "general principles which are common to our free institutions," by which Chief Justice Marshall meant that a simple deprivation of property by the State could not be an authentically "legislative" Act. Fletcher, supra, at 135-139.
Fletcher was not, though, the most telling early example of such review. For its most salient instance in this Court before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment was, of course, the case that the Amendment would in due course overturn, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857). Unlike Fletcher, Dred Scott was textually based on a Due Process Clause (in the Fifth Amendment, applicable to the National Government), and it was in reliance on that Clause's protection of property that the Court invalidated the Missouri Compromise. 19 How., at 449-452. This substantive protection of an owner's property in a slave taken to the territories was traced to the absence of any enumerated power to affect that property granted to the Congress by Article I of the Constitution, id., at 451-452, the implication
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