Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, decided by the Supreme Court in 1816, established that federal courts have the final authority to review state court decisions on questions of federal law, treaties, and the Constitution. Justice Joseph Story, writing for a unanimous Court, upheld Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and rejected Virginia’s claim that its highest court answered to no one on federal questions. The ruling settled whether the United States would have one national legal system or fifty parallel ones.
The Land Fight Behind the Case
The dispute involved the Northern Neck of Virginia, a tract of more than five million acres between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Thomas Sixth Lord Fairfax owned the entire grant and, on his death in 1781, left it to his nephew Denny Martin Fairfax, a British subject living in England.
Virginia’s wartime confiscation laws treated Denny Fairfax’s foreign citizenship as grounds to deny the inheritance. In 1789 the state granted part of the property to David Hunter, a Virginia citizen. The Fairfax heirs argued that two federal treaties protected their title: Article 6 of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which prohibited future confiscations of British property, and Article 9 of the Jay Treaty of 1794, which declared that British subjects holding lands in the United States “shall continue to hold them according to the nature and Tenure of their respective Estates and Titles therein.”
In 1813, in Fairfax’s Devisee v. Hunter’s Lessee, the Supreme Court ruled for the Fairfax side. It held that Lord Fairfax’s devise was valid, that Virginia had never conducted the formal proceeding needed to seize the land, and that Hunter’s 1789 patent “issued improvidently and erroneously, and passed nothing.” Article 9 of the Jay Treaty, the Court added, “completely protects and confirms the title of Denny Fairfax.” The case was sent back to the Virginia Court of Appeals with instructions to enforce the ruling.
Virginia’s Refusal to Obey
The Virginia Court of Appeals refused. Led by Judge Spencer Roane, the state judges issued a formal opinion declaring that the Supreme Court had no authority to review their decisions at all. Roane viewed Virginia’s judiciary as a co-equal sovereign body, and he singled out Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as an unconstitutional invasion of state sovereignty.
Section 25 authorized the Supreme Court to reexamine and reverse or affirm any final judgment from a state’s highest court where a federal treaty, statute, or constitutional provision was at stake and the state court had ruled against the federal claim. Virginia’s position was that Congress could not grant the Supreme Court jurisdiction over independent state courts. If that view had prevailed, every state supreme court would have been free to read federal law however it wanted, with no way to correct a mistaken or hostile interpretation.
The standoff forced the case back to Washington. What had begun as a fight over Virginia farmland had become a fight over whether the Constitution created a single national legal system.
What the Supreme Court Decided in 1816
Justice Story wrote for a unanimous Court and upheld Section 25. His reasoning rested on the text and structure of the Constitution itself.
Article III, Section 1 states that “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as Congress may, from time to time, ordain and establish.” Story emphasized the word “shall.” The grant of judicial power was mandatory, not optional, and the full scope of federal judicial authority had to be exercised somewhere in the federal system. Article III, Section 2 then extends that power to “all Cases” arising under the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties. If a federal question could arise in a state court and the Supreme Court could not review the answer, then federal judicial power would be incomplete, dependent on whether individual state judges happened to agree with the federal government’s reading of its own laws.
Story rejected Virginia’s argument that state and federal courts operated in separate, equal spheres. He acknowledged that states kept broad authority over local matters, but he wrote that the Constitution “is crowded with provisions which restrain or annul the sovereignty of the States in some of the highest branches of their prerogatives.” Federal review of state court rulings on federal questions was one of those built-in restraints. The Constitution, he added, had been “ordained and established” by the people of the United States, not by the states as sovereign entities.
Story also grounded the decision in the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, which makes the Constitution and federal treaties “the supreme Law of the Land” and binds “the Judges in every State.” Without a single reviewing authority, he wrote, judges “of equal learning and integrity in different States might differently interpret a statute or a treaty of the United States, or even the Constitution itself,” and the same federal law “might perhaps never have precisely the same construction, obligation, or efficacy in any two States.”
The Fairfax case itself illustrated the danger. Virginia’s courts had read federal treaty obligations in a way that directly contradicted the Supreme Court’s reading. Foreign governments needed assurance that treaties signed with the national government would be honored the same way in every state.
The Court held that Section 25 was constitutional and that the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction reached cases originating in state courts whenever federal questions were involved. The location of the original trial did not matter. The subject of the dispute did.
Why Marshall Did Not Write the Opinion
Chief Justice John Marshall recused himself. He and his brother James had arranged to purchase a large portion of the Fairfax lands from Denny Martin, giving him a direct financial interest in the outcome. Story took over and produced what became one of the most consequential opinions in the Court’s history.
Justice William Johnson concurred separately. He agreed with the result but noted that the Court “disavows all intention to decide on the right to issue compulsory process to the state courts.” In his view, the federal judiciary was supreme over the cases and parties within its jurisdiction without asserting direct command over state tribunals as institutions.
How the Ruling Was Extended
Five years later, in Cohens v. Virginia (1821), the Court applied the same principle to state criminal cases. The Cohen brothers had been convicted in Virginia for selling lottery tickets authorized by Congress but prohibited by state law. Virginia argued that the Eleventh Amendment barred Supreme Court review when a state was a party. Chief Justice Marshall, writing for a unanimous Court, rejected that argument and held that the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction reached state criminal proceedings whenever a defendant raised a federal constitutional claim. The judicial power of the federal government, he wrote, “is extended to all cases arising under the Constitution or a law of the United States, whoever may be the parties.” Marshall warned that any other rule would let state courts “exercise veto power over federal law or issue multiple and inconsistent interpretations of the Constitution.”
Why the Case Still Matters
Every time the Supreme Court reverses a state court’s reading of a federal statute or strikes down a state law under the Constitution, it uses the authority confirmed in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee. Before 1816 the question was genuinely open, and Virginia’s position had real support among politicians and judges who believed the states had never given up that kind of judicial independence. Story’s opinion settled it.
The practical stakes are large. Without federal review of state court rulings on federal questions, constitutional rights could mean one thing in one state and something else in another, and treaty commitments made by the national government could be reinterpreted or ignored at the state courthouse door. State courts remain the forums where most federal questions first arise. Martin ensured they are not the last word.