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Popular sovereignty is a doctrine rooted in the belief that every human being is sovereign, and rather than a monarch or single individual, that they could unite and each delegate a small portion of their sovereign powers and duties to those who wished to temporarily serve as officers and employees of a state, who would then serve the rest of the people according to the will of the people expressed via a constitution and democratic process. That the people fought for equality with the King of Britain was enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence and was a matter of common knowledge in America after the American Revolution. The first Chief Justice, John Jay, published this in his opinion in the first major Supreme Court case in order to briefly illustrate what was ordained and established and would eventually come to be known by the American usage of the term "popular sovereignty": It will be sufficient to observe briefly that the sovereignties in Europe, and particularly in England, exist on feudal principles. That system considers the Prince as the sovereign, and the people as his subjects; it regards his person as the object of allegiance, and excludes the idea of his being on an equal footing with a subject, either in a court of justice or elsewhere... No such ideas obtain here; at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people, and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects, and have none to govern but themselves() From the differences existing between feudal sovereignties and governments founded on compacts, it necessarily follows that their respective prerogatives must differ. Sovereignty is the right to govern; a nation or State sovereign is the person or persons in whom that resides. In Europe, the sovereignty is generally ascribed to the Prince; here, it rests with the people; there, the sovereign actually administers the government; here, never in a single instance; our Governors are the agents of the people, and, at most, stand in the same relation to their sovereign in which regents in Europe stand to their sovereigns.〔2 U.S. 419 Chisholm v. Georgia, JAY Opinion - ''in part''〕 Further, while it is true that the people are each sovereigns, it is imperative to grasp that the individual people's sovereignty is ''dual-fold''. That is to say, over their bodies, lives, private holdings and the like, they are akin to the Monarchs of Europe (with few exceptions, like the doctrine of eminent domain), but over the several states and the Union (the public property, interests, etc..), they are only ''co-sovereign'' and the public is governed via elected representatives of the people.〔Constitution of the United States: Amendment IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Amendment X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.〕 This important concept of matters and things that are ''public'' and those that are ''private'' can be a source of some confusion for those unfamiliar with the principles. The ''public'' and ''private'' are mutually exclusive, or in other words, that which is ''public'' is not ''private'', and that which is ''private'' is not ''public''.〔Bouvier's Law Dictionary, 1856: PRIVATE. Not general, as a private act of the legislature; not in office; as, a private person, as well as an officer, may arrest a felon; individual, as your private interest; not public, as a private way, a private nuisance.〕 Further, that which is ''public'' is of interest to all the people jointly, not just to one in particular, but in no way was it ever intended to express or imply that the private sector was to be subject to the state public servants. In fact, even over the public sector, it is the people as a whole who remain the sovereign of the several states and the United States of America. In 1886, 93 years after the Supreme Court's holding in ''Chisholm v. Georgia'', Justice Thomas Stanley Matthews expressed this in his opinion in ''Yick Wo v. Hopkins'': When we consider the nature and the theory of our institutions of government, the principles upon which they are supposed to rest, and review the history of their development, we are constrained to conclude that they do not mean to leave room for the play and action of purely personal and arbitrary power. Sovereignty itself is, of course, not subject to law, for it is the author and source of law; but, in our system, while sovereign powers are delegated to the agencies of government, sovereignty itself remains with the people, by whom and for whom all government exists and acts. And the law is the definition and limitation of power. It is, indeed, quite true that there must always be lodged somewhere, and in some person or body, the authority of final decision, and in many cases of mere administration, the responsibility is purely political, no appeal lying except to the ultimate tribunal of the public judgment, exercised either in the pressure of opinion or by means of the suffrage. But the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, considered as individual possessions, are secured by those maxims of constitutional law which are the monuments showing the victorious progress of the race in securing to men the blessings of civilization under the reign of just and equal laws, so that, in the famous language of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, the government of the commonwealth "may be a government of laws, and not of men." For the very idea that one man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living, or any material right essential to the enjoyment of life at the mere will of another seems to be intolerable in any country where freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself.〔Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886) - in part〕 As noted by legal historian Christian G. Fritz in ''American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War,'' both before and after the Revolution, Americans believed "that the people in a republic, like a king in a monarchy, exercised plenary authority as the sovereign. This interpretation persisted from the revolutionary period up to the Civil War." 〔Christian G. Fritz, ''American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War'' (Cambridge University Press, 2008) at p.7 ISBN 978-0-521-88188-3〕 However, as widespread as this belief in the power of the people was, the early Americans infrequently used the term "popular sovereignty" to describe the idea.〔''See, e.g.'', Leonard Levy, ed., ''Encyclopedia of the American Constitution'' (Nathan Tarcov, "Popular Sovereignty (in Democratic Political Theory), vol 3, p. 1426, 1428 (1986) (Noting of the doctrine of popular sovereignty before the Civil War that "the Founders tended not to call the doctrine expounded here as 'popular sovereignty.)〕 Rather, in expressing this founding concept of rule by the people, they would described the ideal of how "the people" would exercise sovereignty in America and that the state officers and employees function as "public servants." The actual use of the term, "popular sovereignty," didn't begin to gain popularity until around the 1840s. ==History of the concept of "popular sovereignty"== The idea that the people were sovereign (often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed) was not invented by the Americans. Rather, the consent of the governed and the idea of the people as a sovereign had clear 17th and 18th century intellectual roots in European history.〔On the English origins of the sovereignty of the people and consent as the basis of government, see John Phillip Reid, ''Constitutional History of the American Revolution'' (4 vols., University of Wisconsin Press, 1986-1993), Vol. III:97-101, 107-10 ISBN 0-299-13070-3 ; Edmund S. Morgan, ''Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America'' (W.W. Norton and Company, 1988) ISBN 0-393-30623-2〕 The American contribution lay in what Americans did with the idea that the people were the sovereign—how they struggled with and put that idea into practice. Before the American Revolution, few examples existed of a people deliberately creating their own governments. Most people in the world experienced governments as an inheritance—whether monarchies or expressions of raw power.〔Gordon S. Wood, ''The Radicalism of the American Revolution'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), at p. 243 ISBN 978-0-679-73688-2 (noting that during their Revolution, Americans "became the first society in the modern world to bring ordinary people into the affairs of government—not just as voters but as actual rulers"); Pauline Maier, ''American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), at p. 34-35 ISBN 978-0-679-77908-7 (observing that in 1776 no governments existed "in which all authority rested on popular choice").〕 What underscored the excitement surrounding the creation of constitutions establishing governments in America after Independence was the fact that Americans deliberately and self-consciously created governments at one single moment explicitly relying on the authority of the sovereignty of the people (or "popular sovereignty"). The American Revolution marked the establishment of the concept of popular sovereignty in large scale practice as it had been discussed and experimented with in the European historical contexts. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the persons of the several European Monarchs, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Henceforth, early Americans (in truth, "European revolutionaries") by and large agreed and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people.〔Paul K. Conkin, ''Self-Evident Truths: Being a Discourse on the Origins & Development of the First Principles of American Government—Popular Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and Balance & Separation of Powers '' (Indiana Univ. Press, 1974), at p. 52 ISBN 978-0-253-20198-0 (describing "the almost unanimous acceptance of popular sovereignty at the level of abstract principle"); Edmund S. Morgan, "The Problem of Popular Sovereignty," in ''Aspects of American Liberty: Philosophical, Historical and Political'' (The American Philosophical Society, 1977), at p. 101 (concluding the American Revolution "confirmed and completed the subordination of government to the will of the people"); Willi Paul Adams, ''The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era'' (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), at p. 137 ISBN 978-0-7425-2069-1 (asserting that statements of the "principle" of the people's sovereignty "expressed the very heart of the consensus among the victors of 1776").〕 Having relied upon the people as the collective sovereign to establish their first state constitutions (and later the Federal constitution), numerous questions remained for Americans to answer. What did a collective sovereign mean? How did one recognize the voice or expression of that collective sovereign and in what ways could that collective sovereign act? Americans struggled and contested over the answers to these questions from the time they declared Independence to the eve of the Civil War. During this period the idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union.〔This is the conclusion reached in Christian G. Fritz, ''American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War'' (Cambridge University Press, 2008) (978-0-521-88188-3 ) (In the prologue to this study, Fritz notes "In framing America's first constitutions, patriots celebrated the people's sovereignty. These ideas smoldered even after the Revolution ended and this heated revolutionary rhetoric soon permeated all regions and ranks of society. Government was no longer something that happened to people. In America it now became something the people – by their consent and volition – brought into being. The people gave their consent through their conduct and their active participation reinforced the message that the people were America's new sovereign." However, "Americans argued fiercely about the nature and the extent of their power as part of the collective sovereign, and seven decades later (independence ) they were no closer to agreement over what the people's sovereignty meant than they were during the Revolution.") (Prologue, ''American Sovereigns'', at p.l )〕 In 18th-century European political thought, "the people" excluded most of the population, such as women, slaves (not just Africans, but all slaves), those lacking sufficient property, people of Tribal Nations (not just Native Americans), and children.〔Gary B. Nash, Gary B., ''Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America'' (Viking, 2005) ISBN 978-0-14-303720-0 (describing how the Revolution laid the groundwork for an expanding definition of who were deemed part of "the people.")〕 While it took many generations to evolve the minds of the majority of the population immigrating to America from the rest of the world to a point where the term "We, the People" included everyone, this ideal was formally achieved at the dawn of the 20th century with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Granted, long before this time, many of the people of several States had already evolved. Historian Ronald Formisano notes that "assertions of the peoples' sovereignty over time contained an unintended dynamic of raising popular expectations for a greater degree of popular participation and that the peoples' will be satisfied." 〔Ronald P. Formisano, ''For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s'' (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008), at p. 43. (978-0-8078-3172-4 )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Popular sovereignty in the United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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