Before Whitney, the Supreme Court faced the Head Money Cases , where the controversy stemmed from the validity of an act of Congress, which imposed a duty on the owners of ships carrying passengers from a foreign country into the United States. In Edye v. Robertson , one of the Head Money Cases, the plaintiffs objected that the act from 1882 violated previous treaties signed by the United States with foreign nations. The Court stated that a treaty is the law of the land as much as an act of Congress is, and that the constitution gives “it no superiority over an act of congress in this respect, which may be repealed or modified by an act of a later date.” This was the first time the Supreme Court made use of the last-in-time rule.

B. Facts

In Whitney v. Robertson, the plaintiffs brought suit to recover duties paid on “centrifugal and molasses sugars” imported from the Dominican Republic. The defendant, the customs collector, imposed duties pursuant to an 1870 federal statute. The plaintiffs claimed that the goods should have been admitted duty free, since an 1867 treaty between the United States and the Dominican Republic provided that the U.S. would not impose higher duties for Dominican imports than for imports of similar articles from other countries. The plaintiffs argued that an 1876 treaty between the U.S. and Hawaii, which provided duty …show more content…
In this case, the treaty with Hawaii was non-self-executing shutting down the plaintiff’s argument. According to Justice Field, who delivered the opinion of the court, the Constitution places treaties and statutes on the same footing; therefore, there is no superiority of one over the