Rowan and Harris v. Runnels/Dissent Daniel

by Peter Vivian Daniel

United States Supreme Court

46 U.S. 134

Rowan and Harris  v.  Runnels

Mr. Justice DANIEL dissented.

From the decision of the court pronounced in these causes, I feel myself constrained to dissent. The rule heretofore announced and uniformly observed by this court, with respect to the construction to be given to the constitutions and statutes of the several States, has been this:-that the interpretations put upon those constitutions and statutes by the supreme tribunals of the States respectively, should be received and followed as the true interpretation. This rule, so reasonable in itself, so inseparable from every idea of the competency, or indeed the very being of the systems of which those constitutions and statutes make an essential part, is not even now denied; but whilst it is, in general terms, assented to in the decision of these causes, it is in effect, if not in terms, by the same decision utterly overthrown. In the case of Groves et al. v. Slaughter, 15 Pet., 449, this court, as it was constrained to do in the absence of any interpretation by the State courts, gave its own construction to the constitution of Mississippi. Since the decision in Groves v. Slaughter, decisions of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, giving an interpretation to the constitution of that State, have become generally known,-they are familiar, unequivocal, uniform, numerous. That any or all of these expositions may have been made posterior to the decision of the cause of Groves v. Slaughter, I hold to be perfectly immaterial, so far as this circumstance can affect their force and validity. If these expositions establish the meaning of the constitution of Mississippi, such meaning must have relation to the period of the consummation of that instrument. The constitution has always been the same thing from the time of its adoption. It could not have been some other thing than the constitution, because it had not been interpreted to this court, and subsequently have become the constitution merely because its interpretation was then generally declared. The decision of the causes now before this court gives to the constitution of Mississippi different meanings at different periods of its existence, and deduces those meanings from circumstances wholly unconnected with the intrinsic signification of the terms of the instrument itself. Such a rule of interpretation involves, in my view, a contradiction which I am wholly unwilling to adopt.