How Did Judicial Review Expand the Power of the Supreme Court

When John Marshall was appointed principal justice of the U.South. Supreme Court in 1801, the nation's highest court occupied a lowly position. At that place was no Supreme Court Building in the newly completed majuscule, Washington, D.C., so the six justices heard cases in a borrowed room in the basement of the Capitol Building. Their docket averaged x cases a year, mostly about shipping disputes.

"Before John Marshall, the Supreme Court was kind of irrelevant," says Joel Richard Paul, a law professor at the University of California Hastings Law School and author of Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times.

But over the class of Marshall's 34-year tenure equally chief justice—spanning six presidential administrations, making information technology the longest on record—the Supreme Court grew in prominence and ability to become a true co-equal to the executive and legislative branches. Some of the foundational doctrines of American law, including the dominance of the Supreme Court to interpret the constitutionality of legislation and executive actions, were doctrines that had no precedent before Marshall created them.

"They were principles that Marshall invented in order to work through some of the bug that the framers of the Constitution had not quite dealt with," says Paul, "Similar the relationship between the federal courts and the state courts, or the human relationship between the powers of congress and the powers of the president."

Along the way, Marshall used his remarkable intellect and down-to-earth camaraderie to win over political foes and shape the Supreme Court into a unified and dignified institution.

Marbury v. Madison—the Courtroom Claims Its Rightful Place

Marshall began his tenure as chief justice during a tumultuous transition. It was the very commencement time that the presidency changed easily from ane political political party to another. Marshall was appointed past John Adams, a staunch Federalist, but would serve under Adams' arch political enemy, Thomas Jefferson, a Autonomous-Republican.

In the waning months of his presidency, Adams hurriedly filled dozens of judicial vacancies with Federalists, including chief justice of the Supreme Courtroom (Marshall was already serving as secretary of state under Adams). On his very concluding day in role, Adams nominated 42 men to serve every bit justices of the peace, but Marshall, acting as secretary of state, didn't have time to complete the paperwork on iv of the commissions, including one for a Virginia politician named William Marbury.

The minute Jefferson took part, he ordered his own secretary of state, James Madison, to turn down Marbury's nomination along with the remaining three. And so Congress, also controlled by Autonomous-Republicans, started impeachment proceedings against Federalist judges, including a Supreme Courtroom justice. As the story is typically told, Marbury decided to take a stand—he direct petitioned the Supreme Court to strength Madison to hand over their commissions.

When Thomas Jefferson (correct) took over the presidency from John Adams (left), Jefferson ordered that the nomination of William Marbury to justice of peace exist rejected.

But while writing his volume on Marshall, Paul uncovered a different origin for the landmark case, Marbury five. Madison. Paul contends that the instance was a "setup" by Marshall himself "to affirm the Court'south authority against Jefferson at a time when the Supreme Court'south very existence as an independent branch of government was threatened."

Marbury was ultimately denied his petition, merely for reasons carefully and brilliantly laid out past Marshall in his stance. Marshall explained that Jefferson and Madison were wrong to block the nominations, and that Marbury was within his rights to sue in federal court, but nigh importantly Congress overstepped its constitutional authority when it passed a 1789 act allowing plaintiffs to petition the Supreme Court straight.

Paul says that Marshall's opinion in Marbury v. Madison was momentous for two reasons. Get-go, it was the first time that the Supreme Court ruled that a police force passed past Congress was unconstitutional. That alone established the doctrine of judicial review, which is the authority of the judicial co-operative to check the legislative power of Congress.

Second, but not likewise-documented, is that Marbury v. Madison as well showed that the federal judiciary has the authority to check the power of executive branch officers like Madison, who thought so little of Marbury's petition that he didn't bother hiring a lawyer or showing up to the hearing.

Curlicue to Go on

"What Marshall says in this opinion is that the executive branch is not higher up the police force," says Paul. "That was unprecedented. Just retrieve where nosotros would be today if the federal courts didn't have that power, like when the Supreme Court ordered Richard Nixon to turn over his tapes during Watergate. Nixon knew that he would be cutting his own throat, but he complied with the gild, considering Marshall established the court as a co-equal branch of regime."

Nether Marshall, Unanimous Decisions and a Unified Court

Earlier Marshall joined the Supreme Court, the standard exercise was for each justice to write their ain opinion for each case. At that time, there were six justices on the Courtroom, and then every case generated vi potentially warring opinions. That made it all but incommunicable for Supreme Court rulings to acquit the weight of precedent, because even the justices couldn't agree.

When Marshall became chief justice, he insisted that the Supreme Court issue a single unified opinion for every example. Information technology would send a clear signal that the Court was the final word on all ramble matters and that its decisions set the precedent for all lower courts.

"Over the course of the side by side 34 years, the Marshall court issued ane,129 decisions and all just 87 of those opinions were unanimous, which is incredible," says Paul, specially because most of Marshall's boyfriend justices were nominated by Democratic-Republican presidents who vehemently disagreed with Marshall's Federalist leanings.

Function of Marshall'south brilliance was the style that he won over political rivals, both with his consensus-building legal arguments and his chummy personality. For example, he insisted that all of the justices share rooms in the same D.C. boarding house, where they ate all of their meals together and unwinded with afternoon wine-drinking sessions.

"Marshall cultivated this 'fraternity house' culture among the justices," says Paul. "They actually bonded together."

According to ane popular tale, the justices had a rule that they would only drink wine on rainy days. On sunny days, Marshall would ask a beau justice to cheque the window and see if information technology looked like rain. Wherever the study, Marshall would inevitably order wine, maxim, "Our jurisdiction is and then vast that it might be raining somewhere."

The Marshall Courtroom Shapes American Legal System and Government

In a series of landmark cases, the Marshall court issued unanimous opinions that elevated the Supreme Courtroom as the ultimate arbiter of constitutional debates. Many of these decisions shaped the very nature of American law and governance.

Chief among the about influential decisions of the Marshall courtroom was McCulloch v. Maryland, which pitted the states against the federal government over the issue of a national depository financial institution. U.s.a. argued that the Constitution did not explicitly give Congress the power to establish a national bank, but supporters of the depository financial institution pointed to Article I, Section eight, which gives Congress the authority "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper" for conveying out its enumerated powers.

As was his custom, Marshall wrote the Court'southward unanimous opinion, and his interpretation of the "necessary and proper" clause in McCulloch v. Maryland "dramatically expanded the powers of Congress," says Paul. As long every bit the end was "legitimate… [and] inside the telescopic of the Constitution," wrote Marshall, Congress may utilize "all ways which are advisable . . . which are not prohibited."

While McCulloch v. Maryland was ostensibly about the national bank, information technology too set the stage for some other battle heating upward between the federal government and the states: whether Congress had the right to regulate or outlaw slavery in the states.

Marshall owned enslaved people at his Virginia homestead, but he opposed slavery as an institution, says Paul. The decision in McCulloch was seen at the time as an open up invitation by the Supreme Court for Congress to stride in and end slavery, which angered the southern states.

Subsequently opinions issued past the Marshall court protected Native American tribal lands from private land sales (Johnson v. M'Intosh), combatted monopolies past giving Congress articulate authority to regulate interstate commerce (Gibbons v. Ogden), and established that the country can't interfere with contracts between individual parties (Dartmouth College v. Woodward).

"In that location was no other Supreme Court justice like John Marshall," says Paul, "and no one who had a more than enduring influence on what our state has go."

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/supreme-court-power-john-marshall