Boston Cab Dispatch, Inc., et al. v. Uber Technologies, Inc., currently before the federal district court of Massachusetts, highlights the tension created when innovation threatens older businesses. Using a mobile phone application, Uber connects passengers to black cars, participating taxicabs, and personal automobiles driven by their owner (UberX). Eliminating the uncertainty of trying to hail a taxicab, or hoping a dispatcher will send one when called, Uber allows users to track the arrival of their car in real-time on a map. In many locations, UberX cars typically are nicer and in better condition than their taxicab counterparts. At the same time, what many riders view as a great convenience, many taxicab drivers loathe as a threat. While the Uber case may involve modern technology, the Supreme Court addressed the heart of its issue almost two centuries ago in another case arising out of Boston.

In 1792, Massachusetts’ legislature granted a charter for a company to operate until 1856 a toll bridge connecting Boston and Charlestown. The crowded Charles River Bridge generated huge amounts of revenue for its owners and became a symbol of monopoly. Then, in 1828, the state legislature did something that threatened to destroy the value of the bridge: it granted a charter to the Warren Bridge Company to build another toll bridge between Boston and Charleston. This bridge would be less than 90 yards from the Charles River Bridge on the Charlestown side and less than 300 yards from it on the Boston side. Making matters worse for the Charles River Bridge’s owners, the charter required the owners of the Warren Bridge to relinquish it to the state within six years and it would become toll-free.

The Charles River Bridge’s owners hired a legal team that included Daniel Webster and sought an injunction to stop the Warren Bridge. Through counsel, they argued to Massachusetts’ highest court that the state had infringed the 1792 charter by granting a charter to a competing company. The proprietors of the Charles River Bridge argued that Massachusetts thus violated the federal Constitution’s prohibition that states could not pass any law which impaired the obligation of contract. They lost and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court; by the time that court issued its ruling, the Warren Bridge had become free.

When Chief Justice Roger Taney – later of Dred Scott infamy – wrote the majority opinion in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), he understood its implications for the vibrant economic development of that day. If granting a charter to one company meant the state could not charter competing companies, technological change and its accompanying improvements would cease. Turnpike companies would soon awake “from their sleep,” Taney warned, suing railroads and canals to stop them from competing, throwing society “back to the improvements of the last century” instead of permitting it to benefit from “modern science[.]” The Supreme Court held that a charter did not protect a company against competition or being rendered obsolete in the course of progress....