The United States v. Hudson and Goodwin
The Court ruled that federal circuit courts have no power to try and punish common-law crimes -- like libel -- unless Congress has passed a law making the conduct a federal crime and specifying which court can hear it.
The decision limits federal courts to the authority Congress actually gives them, rejecting the idea that federal courts inherit a general power to punish wrongdoing simply by existing.
“The legislative authority of the Union must first make an act a crime, affix a punishment .tbit, and declare the Court that shall have jurisdiction of tho offence.”
The Court's core holding that Congress, not courts, must define federal crimes and assign jurisdiction over them.
How it got here: The circuit court judges divided on whether they had jurisdiction over a common-law libel prosecution and certified the jurisdictional question to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
The case arose from a criminal libel prosecution brought in a federal circuit court, even though no act of Congress made libel a federal crime. The circuit court judges disagreed about whether they had the power to try such a case at all, since the alleged offense existed only under traditional common-law principles rather than any federal statute.
The question before the Court
Could a federal circuit court punish someone for a crime like libel even though no federal law had ever made that act a crime?
Why it matters
The ruling means no one can be prosecuted in federal court for a crime that Congress has not specifically defined and assigned to a particular court. This forced Congress, not judges, to decide what conduct counts as a federal crime, shaping how federal criminal law has worked ever since.
What changes now
Because the Court held that circuit courts lack common-law criminal jurisdiction, prosecutions like this one could not proceed absent an act of Congress defining the crime and assigning jurisdiction. Going forward, Congress had to specifically criminalize conduct and designate a court before federal prosecutions could occur, a limitation that has continued to shape federal criminal law and required Congress to enact criminal statutes rather than rely on federal courts to develop common-law crimes.
What this does not decide
The opinion does not decide whether Congress has the power to give federal courts common-law criminal jurisdiction in some other way; it only holds that no such jurisdiction had actually been conferred by any statute in this case.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court framed the question broadly: whether federal circuit courts can exercise a general common-law criminal jurisdiction, since the answer would govern not just libel but any crime not covered by a specific federal statute.
- It reasoned that federal judicial power comes entirely from concessions the states made when they formed the Union, and that only the Supreme Court's jurisdiction comes directly from the Constitution itself.
- Every other federal court, including circuit courts, has only the jurisdiction Congress actually gives it when creating that court -- nothing more, no matter what the Constitution might theoretically allow.
- The Court rejected the argument that any government automatically gains an implied power to punish crimes against itself just by existing, noting this idea is not unique to English common law and does not by itself hand courts criminal jurisdiction.
- The Court distinguished a narrow category of implied powers -- like punishing contempt or enforcing courtroom order -- which courts need simply to function, from a broad power to punish common-law crimes, which is not among those necessary implied powers.
- Because Congress had not passed a law making libel a federal crime and naming the court to hear it, the circuit courts had no authority to exercise jurisdiction over the case.