1900.] HASTINGS—POLICE POWER OF THE STATE. 479 
In the year 1879, in * Tennessee vs. Davis, the right to remove a 
criminal case from state to United States courts when defense of 
acting under federal law is set up was passed upon. James M. 
Davis, a deputy revenue collector of the United States, was in- 
dicted for murder in Grundy county, Tennessee. He applied to 
the Circuit Court of the United States for that district to remove his 
case into that court, on the ground that the act of shooting for 
which he was indicted was in necessary self-defense while he was in 
the official service of the United States. 
The judges of the Circuit Court disagreed as to whether such an 
indictment was removable under section 643 of the United States 
revised statutes, and whether, if removable, there was any pro- 
cedure for trial of it, and whether such a trial of the indictment 
could be had in that court. The Supreme Court, in an opinion 
by Justice Strong, answers all three questions in the affirmative. 
They find the statute provides for removal of the case; that the 
general procedure of the Circuit Court is adequate to its trial. The 
existence of this power is affirmed onthe ground of its necessity in 
order that state action may not paralyze the federal government. 
Justice Clifford, with whom concurred Justice Field, dissented in 
a careful opinion, whose main position was that jurisdiction had 
been given to United States courts by the constitution only over 
offenses against the United States authority. The right of removal 
in this case was asserted because of the claim that the defendant’s 
action was justified by United States law and his duty as an officer. 
The authority to take the prosecution of an offense which was 
solely against the laws of a state out of the hands of that state and 
its courts was earnestly opposed. 
Justices Clifford and Field return almost to Taney’s definition of 
the police power : 
“State police, in its widest sense, comprehends the whole system of 
internal regulation by which the state seeks not only to preserve the 
public order and to prevent offenses against her authority, but also to 
establish for the intercourse of one citizen with another those rules of 
justice, morality and good conduct which are calculated to prevent a 
conflict of interests and to insure to every one the uninterrupted enjoy- 
ment of his own as far as is reasonably consistent with a like enjoyment 
of equal rights by others.” 
1700 U. S., 257 (1879). 
