June 1, 2005
Understanding Wheaton v. Peters
As part of a history class I took this semester (with KC Johnson, who you may know from Cliopatria), I decided to do a little research on Wheaton v. Peters,
the Supreme Court’s first copyright decision, which rejected a
copyright claim under common law and ruled that obtaining a copyright
was dependent on strictly following the federal statute’s
requirements. In so doing, it essentially rejected a natural
rights view of copyright. While scholars have often treated the
case as embodying anti-monopolistic sentiments about copyright at that
time, it has not been entirely clear to me why the Court followed
this view.
One way of attempting to answer why the majority in Wheaton reached its result is to focus on the opinion’s author,
Justice McLean, and how he treated monopolies in other cases. A
biographer of McLean does not devote a word to Wheaton, but at least
one scholar has deemed Justice McLean’s opinion in Wheaton “Jacksonian” in its handling of monopolies. Just three years after Wheaton in Charles River Bridge v. Warren River Bridge,
the Court ruled that monopoly charter grants must be strictly construed
in the public’s interest. This case would come to define the way the
Court limited monopolies in various arenas over the next several
decades.
To explore what drove Wheaton, I drafted a short paper on the subject comparing Justice John McLean’s concurring opinion in Charles River Bridge and his opinion in Wheaton. This
draft is pretty rough, but it reaches some interesting, though
admittedly tentative, conclusions – so, I figured I’d put it out
here. Ultimately, I think the comparison demonstrates that
McLean’s anti-monopoly stance was not related to the broader
anti-monopoly issues at stake in Charles River Bridge; deeming it Jacksonian in that sense is improper. What’s more, McLean’s views in Wheaton may have in part been connected to his views on federalism and separation of powers. All comments are most welcome.
[updated 10:13]
Filed by Derek Slater at 5:23 pm under General news
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