Duvall, Gabriel
Duvall, Gabriel
Birth: December 6, 1752, Prince George's County, Maryland.
Education: Classical preparatory schooling; studied law.
Official Positions: Clerk, Maryland Convention, 1775–1777; clerk, Maryland House of Delegates, 1777–1787, 1787–1794; member, Maryland State Council, 1782–1785; U.S. representative, 1794–1796; chief justice, General Court of Maryland, 1796–1802; presidential elector, 1796, 1800; first comptroller of the Treasury, 1802–1811.
Supreme Court Service: Nominated associate justice by President James Madison, November 15, 1811, to replace Samuel Chase, who had died; confirmed by the Senate, November 18, 1811, by a voice vote; took judicial oath November 23, 1811; resigned January 14, 1835; replaced by Philip Barbour, nominated by President Andrew Jackson.
Death: March 6, 1844, Prince George's County, Maryland.
Participation in Key Cases
Opinions Written
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Document Outline
Gabriel Duvall
Bibliography
Noteworthy Opinions
Gabriel Duvall
Gabriel Duvall was nominated to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the death of Samuel Chase of Maryland. On the same day, Joseph Story was named to the seat left vacant by the death of William Cushing. Both were confirmed only three days later. The striking contrast between the two nominees suggests a presidential stratagem by which Duvall's confirmation could be cast as balancing Story's. Although both men had served in their state legislatures and in the House of Representatives, at the time of their nominations, Story had just turned thirty-two, and Duvall was nearly fifty-nine. Story had no judicial experience, but Duvall had served for six years as chief judge of the Maryland General Court and recorder of the mayor's court. Certainly, their ages and backgrounds gave no hint either to the length of their tenures or to the extent of their jurisprudential legacies.
Notwithstanding his prior experience as a judge, Duvall sat quietly in the Supreme Court; in twenty-three years, he wrote opinions in only seventeen cases. All were nicely crafted examples of the judicial art, but none were of much significance other than to the parties involved. As he had been the first comptroller of the Treasury, Duvall wrote most often for the Court in disputes arising from audits of public accounts.
Duvall's most frequently cited opinion appears in Walton v. United States (1824), in which the Court held that a bill of exceptions (the formal list of objections made at trial) properly prepared at, or immediately following, trial was the jurisdictional sine qua non of appeal. In another frequently cited case, Boyd's Lessee v. Graves (1819), he adopted for the Court the rule that a boundary line marked out and honored by the parties over many years prevails over the terms of a land patent with which it varies.
In Prince v. Bartlett (1814), a federal marshal, in pursuit of goods against which to levy a federal judgment, burgled the storehouse in which they had been placed by a county sheriff after execution of a state writ of attachment. Notwithstanding the provocative facts of the case, the Court eschewed a ruling on federalism and found lacking the statutory conditions for affording priority to the federal claim. Subsequently, courts have relied on Prince v. Bartlett for the distinction drawn by Duvall in that case between bankruptcy and mere insolvency.
In United States v. January (1813), Duvall fashioned the federal rule that the ordinary practice permitting first the debtor and alternatively the creditor to designate to which among competing obligations a payment should be applied did not pertain when different sureties, under distinct obligations, were interested.
During Duvall's entire tenure on the bench, John Marshall headed the Supreme Court. In only two cases did Duvall offer for the record a dissent from the position taken by the great chief justice. In the famous case of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Duvall dissented without offering a full opinion, entering in the record only a brief note calling attention to the apparent consensus of French lawyers in 1786 that had a royal charter been properly issued to the French East India Company, it would have been irrevocable.
Duvall's most moving opinion came in Mima Queen and Child v. Hepburn (1813), when he alone disagreed with Marshall's opinion refusing admission in the courts of the District of Columbia of hearsay evidence to prove a person was not a slave. Marshall wrote for the Court with great sympathy for the plight of petitioners and others in their condition but failed to see any distinction between freedom cases like this and others “in which a right to property may be asserted.” Duvall rested his dissent on the practice of admitting hearsay in such cases by the courts of Maryland, the laws of which were supposed by act of Congress to be adopted in the courts for that part of the District formerly part of Maryland. He also based his dissent on the more serious consequences for “persons of color” of excluding hear say in freedom cases than in other boundary, pedigree, custom, and prescription disputes in which hearsay exceptions were already widely recognized.
Bibliography
Very little has been written on Duvall. But see Irving Dillard, “Gabriel Duvall” in Friedman and Israel, Justices, vol. 1, 419; and G. Edward White, The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815–35 (1988), 321–327.
Noteworthy Opinions
Mima Queen and Child v. Hepburn, 11 U.S. 290 (1813) (Dissent)
Prince v. Bartlett, 12 U.S. 431 (1814)
Boyd's Lessee v. Graves, 17 U.S. 513 (1819)
Walton v. United States, 22 U.S. 651 (1824)