ABSTRACT
This chapter discovers the important aspects of Supreme Court opinions and places those aspects into a convenient organizational framework. It examines how the holistic Constitution works. The nexus between the compact and federalism is evident in a number of early Supreme Court cases. In contrast, Virginia argued in Martin that the Supreme Court's "appellate jurisdiction over state courts is inconsistent with the genius of people governments and the spirit of the constitution." The Constitution was "never designed to act upon state sovereignties, but only on the people. "In Barron v. Baltimore, the compact is invoked to clarify aspects of federalism and the Bill of Rights. Consequently, the Bill of Rights limited only that government. It is not until nearly a century later that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates federal rights into its due process clause, expanding the scope of the Bill of Rights to include the states.
