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The Supreme Court and the Growth of Federal Judicial Power

Despite the radical Jeffersonian attack on the federal judicial system, the influence of the Supreme Court grew steadily during the period 1801-1815. Its growing prestige owed much to the leadership of John Marshall, a Virginian, a Federalist, and an able lawyer. The chief justice blended a gifted intellect, modest and unpretentious behavior, and "the rare faculty of condensation; he distilled an argument down to its essence." 50 He had a vision of greatness based on the belief that the new nation needed strong institutions through which people of ability could exercise authority to the benefit of all. Marshall believed that the judiciary should separate the majesty of the law from politics. That did not mean, however, that Marshall was nonpolitical--far from it. He well understood that the Court purchased its success by not intruding on those responsibilities that clearly belonged to the elected branch. He devoted more than three decades to establishing the basic principle that law embraced certain core values free from overt political considerations and that the justices had to treat constitutional disputes, while certainly ripe with political consequences, as matters for legal judgment.

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The Rise of Federal Judicial Review

Marshall's most notable achievement during these years was to establish that the high court could review both federal and state laws. "If Congress were to make a law not warranted by any of the powers enumerated," Marshall had argued at the Virginia convention to ratify the federal Constitution in 1788, "it would be considered by the judges as an infringement of the Constitution which they are to guard. . . . They would declare it void." 51 Marshall supplied a practical meaning to these words in the classic case of Marbury v. Madison ( 1803) and then, seven years later, he demonstrated the importance of judicial review to American federalism by striking down a state law in Fletcher v. Peck ( 1810).

Marshall himself contributed to the chain of events that culminated in Marbury. Shortly before his appointment to the Court in 1801, Marshall, as secretary of state, failed to deliver a commission as justice of the peace in the District of Columbia to William Marbury, a loyal Federalist and one of Adams's midnight appointees. Marbury subsequently requested that James Madison, the new Republican secretary of state, issue the commission. Madisonrefused, and Marbury went directly to the Supreme Court, claiming that section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 gave the Court original jurisdiction to issue writs of mandamus. (The writ was a command by a court to a ministerial officer ordering certain actions.) Marbury expected the Federalist- dominated Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus ordering the Jeffersonian Republican-controlled executive branch to deliver his commission.

Marbury's request coincided with the radical Jeffersonian attack on the federal judiciary. Marshall certainly appreciated the political exigencies involved, but he was also determined to demonstrate that on matters of constitutional and legal interpretation the Court had an authoritative voice.



The first part of the chief justice's opinion sustained Marbury's claim on the basis that there were certain rights in nature, called vested rights, with which government could not tamper. Marbury had been granted a species of property through his commission and, by law, he was entitled to receive it. The Court, Marshall continued, had the authority to reach such a conclusion because it was obligated under the Constitution to protect rights based in fundamental law. Marshall distinguished between political and other rights, finding that the former was the exclusive domain of the elected branches while the latter, which included Marbury's claim to his commission, was the responsibility of the Court.

What Marshall gave to Marbury in the first part of the decision he took away in the second part. Having stated the basis for judicial review (maintaining fundamental rights), he then found that the Court could not provide a remedy to Marbury. Why? Because, Marshall said, Congress in section 13 had improperly augmented the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The Constitution in Article III stated fully what the Court's original jurisdiction was to include, and it did not include issuing writs of mandamus.

Marshall worried that an expansion of the Court's original jurisdiction would thrust the justices into political disputes. The chief justice enunciated the principle that under the doctrine of separation of powers, the justices would not enforce unconstitutional acts of Congress. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department," he wrote, "to say what the law is. . . . If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each."52 Interpreting law was not

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synonymous with making it; Marshall saw legal principles as omnipresent and immutable.

Marshall's Marbury opinion was important in several ways. First, it fixed the idea of vested rights and made the Court a protector of them. Second, it propounded the same departmental theory of judicial review that the state appellate courts were developing in dealing with state legislatures. Third, it was only one of two instances before the Civil War when the Court did strike down a federal law, the other coming in the famous slave case of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. The Court was far more active, when unencumbered by the departmental theory, in reviewing state legislative acts that raised a federal constitutional issue or conflicted with a federal law or treaty.

In Fletcher v. Peck ( 1810) Marshall affirmed the sanctity of contracts and expanded their meaning to include grants made by state governments to individuals. The Fletcher case involved claims to millions of acres of land in the present-day states of Alabama and Mississippi that the Georgia legislature had sold to speculators. Money had greased the skids of legislative action; almost every member of the legislature had been bribed. A subsequent legislature, amid great public fanfare, repealed the original legislation, although by this time the speculators had unloaded most of the land on innocent third parties.

Marshall's opinion in Fletcher declared the repeal act in violation of the contract clause of the Constitution. The chief justice also held that states, even though they were sovereign for some purposes, had to abide by their contractual agreements. Marshall supported property rights, a major tenet of Federalist policy, and threw behind them the power of the federal judiciary. The decision was in many ways more important than that in Marbury, because the Court demonstrated that through judicial review of state acts it could have a distributive effect on competing national economic interests. Although the Federalists had lost the political battle, John Marshall secured through public law their vision of a growing commercial empire.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1049


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