In all mat­ters con­sti­tu­tional, the Supreme Court rules on the laws of the land. As of now, Chief Jus­tice John Roberts pre­sides over a court con­sist­ing of him­self, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Gins­burg, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito. It was under John Jay ((Jay was nom­i­nated in 1789 by Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton as the first Chief Jus­tice of the United States. He presided over the court until 1795 and was instru­men­tal in estab­lish­ing the inter­nal pro­ce­dures of the Supreme Court and set­ting legal prece­dents.)) that the first sub­stan­tial case was decided by the Court.

In 1792, Alexan­der Chisholm of South Car­olina, the execu­tor of the estate of Robert Far­quhar, attempted to sue the state of Geor­gia in the Supreme Court over pay­ments due them for goods that Far­quhar had sup­plied Geor­gia dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. In 1793, U.S. Attor­ney Gen­eral Edmund Ran­dolph argued the case for the plain­tiff before the Court in “Chisholm v. Geor­gia”. Geor­gia refused to appear, claim­ing that as a “sov­er­eign,” a state did not have to appear in court to hear a suit against it to which it did not consent.

The Court, in a 4–1 deci­sion, found in favor of the plain­tiff, with Chief Jus­tice Jay con­cur­ring with Jus­tices Blair, Wil­son, and Cush­ing ((That would be John Blair, James Wil­son and William Cush­ing.)), with Jus­tice James Iredell dis­sent­ing. ((The Court has fluc­tu­ated in mem­ber­ship size over the course of the his­tory of the United States. The Judi­ciary Act of 1789 set the size orig­i­nally at 6, but it was as high as 10 in 1863. With the Cir­cuit Judges Act of 1869, the num­ber of Jus­tices was again set at nine (the Chief Jus­tice and eight Asso­ciate Jus­tices), where it has remained ever since.)) The Court argued that Arti­cle 3, Sec­tion 2 of the Con­sti­tu­tion abro­gated the States’ sov­er­eign immu­nity and granted fed­eral courts the affir­ma­tive power to hear dis­putes between pri­vate cit­i­zens and States.

In 1795, largely as a result of the Chisolm deci­sion, the Eleventh Amend­ment was rat­i­fied, which removed fed­eral juris­dic­tion in cases where cit­i­zens of one state or for­eign coun­tries attempt to sue another state. How­ever, cit­i­zens of one state or for­eign coun­tries can still use the Fed­eral courts if the state con­sents to be sued or if Con­gress, pur­suant to a valid exer­cise of Four­teenth Amend­ment reme­dial pow­ers, abro­gates the states’ immu­nity from suit. ((The facts for this piece come from Ask Yahoo! and Oyez! The U.S. Supreme Court Media site.))