Fletcher v. Peck
The Court ruled that once Georgia's legislature sold public land under a valid law, it could not later pass a new law taking that land back from people who had bought it without knowing about any wrongdoing in the original sale.
The decision marked one of the first times the Supreme Court struck down a state law for violating the Constitution, holding that a land grant is a contract the Contracts Clause protects, and that courts generally should not second-guess a legislature's motives.
“A party is, therefore, always estopped by his own grant.”
Explaining why a legislature cannot take back land it has already granted.
How it got here: The case reached the Supreme Court on writ of error from the U.S. Circuit Court, after that court sustained several of Peck's pleas and a jury returned a special verdict on the title question.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Robert Fletcher bought Georgia land from John Peck, whose title traced back to an 1795 sale by the Georgia legislature to a group of investors. Amid allegations that some legislators had been bribed to approve that sale, a later Georgia legislature passed a law voiding the original grant. Fletcher sued Peck, claiming Peck's deed had breached promises that Georgia validly owned and could sell the land.
The question before the Court
After Georgia's legislature canceled a earlier land sale over bribery claims, could it take the land back from people who had innocently bought it afterward?
Why it matters
The ruling protected buyers of land (and, by extension, other property acquired under government-issued contracts) from having their titles wiped out by a later, politically motivated law. It gave real teeth to the Constitution's ban on states impairing contracts, shaping how secure land titles and government-granted property rights would be for the next two centuries.
What changes now
The judgment for Peck was affirmed with costs, meaning Fletcher's suit against him failed and the underlying land titles derived from Georgia's 1795 sale remained valid against the state's later rescinding act. The ruling settled, for purposes of this litigation, that innocent purchasers' titles survived the political controversy over the original Yazoo land sale, though the Court explicitly avoided ruling on whether Georgia's legislature had actually been corrupted.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly declined to decide whether the original 1795 Georgia land sale was in fact procured by bribery, or whether a court could ever void a legislative contract for corruption if the state itself sued to undo it. It ruled only on the narrower question of protecting innocent purchasers who had no notice of any wrongdoing.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent in part — Justice Johnson
“the distinction lies between power and interest, the right of jurisdiction and the right of soil.”Johnson's alternative reasoning for why a state cannot revoke its own land grants.
Justice Johnson agreed that Georgia could not revoke its own land grant and that the judgment should be affirmed, but he reached that conclusion from general principles of law and justice rather than the Constitution's Contracts Clause, doubting that a completed grant still carries an ongoing 'obligation' the Clause protects. He also disagreed on the Indian-title question, arguing Georgia held only a mere possibility or pre-emptive right to buy the land from the Indian nations, not a fee-simple estate, so the covenant of seisin in fee should not have been upheld as written.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first addressed whether Georgia's 1789 constitution barred its legislature from selling the disputed land, applying a cautious standard: a law should only be declared unconstitutional when the conflict between the law and the constitution is clear and strong, not based on doubtful implication. Finding no such conflict, the Court held the original 1795 sale was validly authorized.
- The Court refused to let a private lawsuit between two individuals become the vehicle for deciding whether the Georgia legislature had been corrupted into passing the 1795 law, reasoning that such a serious inquiry into the motives of a sovereign lawmaking body could not be resolved collaterally in an ordinary contract dispute between private buyers who had no notice of any wrongdoing.
- Turning to the rescinding law, the Court reasoned that a land grant, once issued, is a completed contract that extinguishes the grantor's own right to take the land back — legally similar to being permanently barred (estopped) from denying one's own prior grant.
- Because the buyers down the chain from the original purchasers had no notice of any corruption and paid value for the land, the Court held that ordinary principles of equity protecting innocent purchasers, along with the Constitution's Contracts Clause forbidding laws that impair the obligation of contracts, prevented Georgia from undoing their titles.
- The Court also examined a special jury verdict tracing the land's history through colonial charters and treaties, concluding that the land lay within Georgia's boundaries and that the state held the underlying title, notwithstanding a still-unextinguished Indian right of occupancy, so Georgia had the power to grant it in fee.