“Chief Justice John Marshall’s great disquisition on the commerce clause,” writes legal scholar Leonard W. Levy, “is the most influential in our history.” In constitutional terms, it completed his great nationalist project, the establishment of federal supremacy. It struck down the New York steamboat monopoly as an affront to Congress’s exclusive jurisdiction over interstate commerce, refuting the claim that the states shared power in that area. In practical terms, it threw the high court’s weight behind the gathering momentum of competitive individualism—of laissez-faire—in American law and
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