236
Stevens, J., dissenting
judicial rather than a legislative question, and can be settled finally only by this Court.' " United States v. Morrison, 529 U. S. 598, 614 (2000) (quoting Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U. S. 241, 273 (1964) (Black, J., concurring)). For, as this Court has long recognized, "[i]t is obviously correct that no one acquires a vested or protected right in violation of the Constitution by long use, even when that span of time covers our entire national existence." Walz v. Tax Comm'n of City of New York, 397 U. S. 664, 678 (1970).
It would be particularly unwise to attach constitutional significance to the 1831 amendment because of the very different legal landscape against which it was enacted. Congress based its authority to pass the amendment on grounds shortly thereafter declared improper by the Court. The Judiciary Committee Report prepared for the House of Representatives asserted that "an author has an exclusive and perpetual right, in preference to any other, to the fruits of his labor." 7 Cong. Deb., App., p. cxx (1831). The floor debate echoed this same sentiment. See, e. g., id., at 424 (statement of Mr. Verplanck (rejecting the idea that copyright involved "an implied contract existing between an author and the public" for "[t]here was no contract; the work of an author was the result of his own labor" and copyright was "merely a legal provision for the protection of a natural right")). This sweat-of-the-brow view of copyright, however, was emphatically rejected by this Court in 1834 in Wheaton v. Peters, 8 Pet., at 661 ("Congress, then, by this act, instead of sanctioning an existing right, as contended for, created it"). No presumption of validity should attach to a statutory enactment that relied on a shortly thereafter discredited interpretation of the basis for congressional power.11
11 In the period before our decision in Wheaton, the pre-emptive effect of the Patent/Copyright Clause was also a matter of serious debate within the legal profession. Indeed, in their argument in this Court in Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat., at 44-61, 141-157, the defenders of New York's grant of a 30-year monopoly on the passenger trade between New Jersey and
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