The appeal may be made for the purpose of testing the constitutionality of a law.

The case from Alabama was carried to the Supreme Court expressly to determine the constitutionality of the Alabama Constitution.

Nor is it unworthy of remark, that the Chief Justice, in abstaining from questioning the constitutionality of the act, expressly intimated that he did so because, by the use of his reason, he could make that reasonable and constitutional which otherwise might be unreasonable and unconstitutional.

In 1798 a Federalist Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, whose constitutionality no Federalist judge ever doubted, but which Jefferson considered as clearly a violation of the fundamental compact, since they tended to drive certain states, as he thought, into "revolution and blood."

I do not claim any constitutionality for a rebellion successful or otherwise, so long as that rebellion means in the ordinary sense of the term, what it does mean namely wresting justice by violent means.

3. To pass upon the constitutionality of a law.

The nature of the law was ably discussed by W.W. Ellsworth and Calvin Goddard, who maintained that it was unconstitutional, and by A.T. Judson and C.F. Cleveland, who undertook to prove its constitutionality.

In approving this bill I feel it due to myself to say, as well that my motives for signing it may be rightly understood as that my opinions may not be liable to be misconstrued or quoted hereafter erroneously as a precedent, that I have not proceeded so much upon a clear and decided opinion of my own respecting the constitutionality or policy of the entire act as from respect to the declared will of the two Houses of Congress.

To relieve the Supreme Court, which was years behind with its work, congress recently provided for a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in each of the nine circuits, which has final appellate jurisdiction in nearly all cases except those involving the constitutionality of a law.

President Jackson conceded the constitutionality, under suitable circumstances, of the improvement of rivers and harbors through the agency of Congress, and President Polk admitted the propriety of the establishment and support by appropriations from the Treasury of light-houses, beacons, buoys, and other improvements within the bays, inlets, and harbors of the ocean and lake coasts immediately connected with foreign commerce.

This attitude of the aristocracy compelled Szechenyi to avoid as much as possible all questions concerning constitutionality and liberty, and to confine the work of reform chiefly to the sphere of internal improvements.

The legislatures have, much more tardily than in their legislation for children and for women, acted contrary to this assumption, but, when this has been done, the courts in America have vigorously asserted the general doctrine and denied the constitutionality of the laws.