Marshall Court

10 Key excerpts on "Marshall Court"

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  A Chief Justice's Progress

  John Marshall from Revolutionary Virginia to the Supreme Court

  • David Robarge(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Second, and most significant for the Court's impact on daily life and the material world, he was a constitutional and economic nationalist, developing and adjusting the federal "common market" by according constitutional protection to property rights and corporations, restricting state mercantilism, and promoting investment and expansion through the agency of the federal courts. The Marshall Court was a vital element of the transformation of American law that occurred during the 248 A CHIEF JUSTICE'S PROGRESS metamorphosis of the United States from a republican to a liberal-capitalist society between the Revolutionary and Jacksonian periods. Lastly, having spent two decades as a lawyer and politician before his appointment as chief justice, Marshall was a profoundly political jurist whose judicial statecraft and economic objectives interwove his constitutional decisions with the era's most salient and controversial public issues. He initially tried to salvage Federalism as a party and a political order through the national judiciary and the legal profession, but by the end of his life, he saw it eclipsed by a new political system that he decried but that, ironically, was complementary to, and reinforced by, an expanding economic revolution to which his decisions contributed so prominently. This final chapter, then, will not attempt to synopsize or analyze the Supreme Court decisions and constitutional and legal development during Marshall's 34- year tenure as chief justice, nor to synthesize hundreds of interpretations into a few dozen pages, nor to comprehensively narrate the balance of Marshall's life. Instead, it will present an impressionistic, and occasionally episodic, projection of the major themes of Marshall's early years into his service on the Court, showing how his experiences, character traits, and legal and political views up to 1801 manifested themselves in the judicial and partisan controversies in which he became involved subsequently.

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  The Judicial Branch of Federal Government

  People, Process, and Politics

  • Charles L. Zelden(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  By 1835, when Marshall died, the Supreme Court had become a full-fledged third branch of government, protecting its own powers and holding the other branches of the federal government as well as the states accountable to its deci- sions through the judicial review of their legislative policies. It was a remarkable achievement, and the reason why schol- ars still recognize Chief Justice John Marshall as the most important chief justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. The power of judicial review was, and is, an immensely powerful tool in the hands of federal judges in that it en- sures that the Supreme Court will find itself enmeshed in most political contro- versies confronting the country as con- stitutional challenges to federal and state legislation are brought before the federal courts under this power. Charles River Bridge and the Transportation Revolution Another famous case in which the polit- ical currents of the era can be seen oper- ating on the Supreme Court, and through which the Court, utilizing judicial re- view, shaped the policy choices of the na- tion is the famous 1837 case of Charles River Bridge Co. v. Warren Bridge Co. By the 1830s the American culture and economy had changed from earlier years. No longer was the law concerned, as it had been in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries, with promoting stabil- ity alone; rather, change and growth were now seen as the ultimate goal of society and hence of the law. With the inaugura- tion of President Andrew Jackson in March 1829 came the age of the common man, a leveling of the social hierarchy, and an opening of the society to new peo- ple and values. In terms of the economy, the older mercantilist assumptions of governmental control to preserve social stability were slowly giving way to the rise of the market economy that valued risk taking by investors and entrepre- neurs and larger capital investment.

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  The American Supreme Court, Sixth Edition

  • Robert G. McCloskey, Sanford Levinson(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  THREE The Marshall Court and the Shaping of the Nation: 1810–1835

  So far the story of the Supreme Court has been largely prelude. The judges have been deviled by uncertainties about their own status in the young American polity and about the power and malevolence of the forces that might imperil that status. Since the constitutional agreement of 1789 was inexplicit about the nature and scope of judicial authority, the Court has inherited the responsibility for drawing up its own commission, one line at a time, and the task has been delicate. Only gradually has it become apparent that the Court is being accepted as a symbol of constitutionalism and can therefore count on a solid measure of public support. Only with experience has it become clear to Marshall and his judicial brethren that the Republicans are not after all savage revolutionaries, that their bark is worse than their bite, and that the rule of law can therefore survive even though the Federalist Party may not. In such a prelude, amid such uncertainties, the Court has been able to lay the argumentative bases for future accomplishments; it has fashioned some of the tools which may later be used to help govern America. But it has not yet been in a position to exert much real influence on the course of affairs. It has built its own fences with some cunning, but has not so far done much to build the nation.

  However, with the War of 1812 and its immediate aftermath a new stage in the Court’s history was inaugurated. We have seen that the slow accretion of precedents and confidence culminated in 1810, when the judges at last felt secure enough to hold a state law unconstitutional. Logically, the Court was then ready to begin to make its weight felt in the political order, to defend and foster in a concrete way the principle of national union. Now this logical development was stimulated and strengthened by the war’s impact on American attitudes and political alignments.

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  The Constitution in the Supreme Court

  The First Hundred Years, 1789-1888

  • David P. Currie(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Part Two Chief Justice Marshall 1801–1835 Passage contains an image Introduction to Part Two

  When John Marshall was appointed Chief Justice in 1801, as we have seen, the slate was by no means clean; his predecessors had established a number of important principles of constitutional jurisprudence. They had done so, however, in a tentative and unobtrusive manner, through suggestions in the seriatim opinions of individual Justices and through conclusory statements or even silences in brief per curiam announcements. Moreover, the Court had resolved remarkably few important substantive constitutional questions. It had essentially set the stage for John Marshall.

  Marshall’s long tenure divides naturally into three periods. From 1801 until 1810, notwithstanding the explosive decision in Marbury v. Madison ,1 the Court was if anything less active in the constitutional field than it had been before Marshall. Only a dozen or so cases with constitutional implications were decided; most of them concerned relatively minor matters of federal jurisdiction; most of the opinions were brief and unambitious. Moreover, the cast of characters was undergoing rather constant change. Of Marshall’s five original colleagues, William Cushing, William Paterson, Samuel Chase, and Alfred Moore had all been replaced by 1811.2

  From the decision in Fletcher v. Peck 3 in 1810 until about 1825, in contrast, the list of constitutional cases contains a succession of landmarks: Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee ,4 McCulloch v. Maryland ,5 Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward ,6 Cohens v. Virginia ,7 Gibbons v. Ogden ,8 Osborn v. Bank of the United States ,9 to name only a few. This was a time of vigorous affirmation of national authority and of vigorous enforcement of constitutional limitations on the states; a time of extensive opinions in the grand style we have come to associate with Marshall; a time, moreover, of remarkable stability and official unanimity. For most of the fifteen crucial years between 1810 and 1825, the Court comprised the same seven Justices: Marshall, Bushrod Washington, William Johnson, Brockholst Livingston, Thomas Todd, Joseph Story, and Gabriel Duvall.10 Though all but Marshall and Washington had been appointed by the anti-Federalist Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison,11 the rarity of recorded dissent during this period was so great as to be almost incredible by modern standards. Some part of the apparent unanimity was doubtless due to Marshall’s policy of keeping disagreements within the Court;12

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  The Supreme Court as Final Arbiter in Federal-State Relations, 1789-1957

  • John R. Schmidhauser(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER III : The Marshall Court, 1801-1835 NATIONAL POLITICS AND THE SUPREME COURT A NY ATTEMPT to evaluate the early 19th century role of the Supreme Court as arbiter in federal-state relations without consideration of the influence of national politics would be wholly unrealistic. The very fact that Thomas Jefferson was to be President had given the nationalists a thrill of horror. And after their bitter and crafty attempt at resolving the tie in the electoral college vote in favor of Jefferson’s running mate, Aaron Burr, the defeated nationalists were aware that after the new office holders took their seats, the national executive and legislature would be in the hands of the party of states’ rights. It is not surprising that the nationalists then turned to their last alternative, fully convinced, in the candid words of President John Adams, that, “In the future administration of our country, the firmest security we can have against the effects of visionary schemes of fluctuating theories will be a solid Judiciary.…” 1 In order to make the federal judiciary “solid,” the nationalists in the “lame-duck” session of Congress in 1800-01 hastily drew up an act containing a number of important alterations in the existing judicial system. The tragedy of the whole situation was that while many of the reforms included in the bill, such as the creation of new districts, circuits and judgeships and the relief of the Supreme Court justices from the arduous circuit riding duty, were long overdue from the standpoint of judicial efficiency, 2 the political timing of the legislation aroused fierce opposition. In addition the inclusion of a provision for reduction of the Supreme Court’s membership after the next vacancy was correcdy viewed as an attempt to deny the incoming President the opportunity to make an appointment to the Court

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  Judges on Judging

  Views from the Bench

  • David M. O′Brien(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 The Doctrine of Judicial ReviewMr. Marshall, Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Marbury

  Warren E. Burger

  Chief Justice, Supreme Court of the United States (1969–1986) and Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia (1956–1969)

  Lord Bryce once observed :

  No feature of the government of the United States has awakened so much curiosity in the European mind, caused so much discussion, received so much admiration, and been more frequently misunderstood, than the duties assigned to the Supreme Court and the functions which it discharges in guarding the Ark of the Constitution.1

  I should add that in some quarters, the Supreme Court’s guardianship of that Ark probably has received more guarded praise than in distant places where its impact is purely theoretical. Lord Bryce, of course, had reference to the doctrine of judicial review, sometimes described as the doctrine of judicial supremacy, in the interpretation of constitutional terms and principles. . . .

  It is helpful to an understanding of this subject to examine it in the setting in which Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803 with all its momentous consequences for our country and to suggest to you that this great case had its antecedents in our colonial experience, and its taproots in the declarations of fundamental rights of Englishmen back to Magna Carta.

  Marbury v. Madison: Act One, the Setting

  Very early in the history of our country the colonial experience of living under a parliamentary system with no check on the legislative or executive branch, except that of popular will in a limited way, led our Founding Fathers to feel strongly the need for limitations on all branches of government. The intellectual spadework for the system ultimately adopted for our federal government had been done, of course, by such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theorists as Hobbes and Locke.2 As we know, the great rationalist Montesquieu contributed the notion of a separation of powers within the government itself, in order that each branch might act as a sort of brake upon the others.3 As the system works today, one of the checks exercised by the Supreme Court involves measuring executive or legislative action against the Constitution whenever a challenge to such action is first properly brought within the framework of a “case” or “controversy,”4 and then properly brought within the “appellate jurisdiction”5

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  Seriatim

  The Supreme Court Before John Marshall

  • Scott Douglas Gerber(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  The American Supreme Court (1960), arguably the most important book ever written about the Court:

  It is hard for a student of judicial review to avoid feeling that American constitutional history from 1789 to 1801 was marking time. The great shadow of John Marshall, who became Chief Justice in the latter year, falls across our understanding of that first decade; and it has therefore the quality of a play’s opening moments with minor characters exchanging trivialities while they and the audience await the appearance of the star.5

  There are countless other examples of the pre-Marshall Court being trivialized by law professors, historians, and political scientists.6 Invariably, scholars point out that Robert H. Harrison never served as an associate justice after he was confirmed, and that William Cushing declined elevation from associate to chief justice. Similarly, Charles C. Pinckney, Edward Rutledge, Alexander Hamilton, and Patrick Henry—significant statesmen in the 1790s—refused to be appointed to the Court, and several men who were appointed resigned to accept other positions. Most notable among the latter group, John Rutledge left the Court after two years to become chief justice of the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, and John Jay, who spent part of his Supreme Court tenure serving as minister to Great Britain, resigned from the Court to become governor of New York, and later refused reappointment to the Court.

  After noting the difficulty of staffing the early Supreme Court, scholars usually mention in passing a few cases, such as Hay burn’s Case (1792), Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), Ware v. Hylton (1796), Hylton v. United States (1796), and Calder v. Bull (1798), and then hurry on to discuss related Marshall Court opinions. While some may hesitate for a moment to address Chisholm v. Georgia , those who do typically emphasize that this decision was overturned in 1798 by the Eleventh Amendment. Finally, many scholars cite the absence of a separate Supreme Court building as evidence that the early Court lacked prestige.7

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  The Role of Circuit Courts in the Formation of United States Law in the Early Republic

  Following Supreme Court Justices Washington, Livingston, Story and Thompson

  • David Lynch(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  In an extremely politically sensitive case the Court sat-isfied the Federalists to a limited extent by declaring that Marbury should have had his commission and at the same time placated the Republicans by holding that the Court did not have jurisdiction to grant the relief. Most importantly, Marshall held that the Constitution empowered the Court to review the acts of the executive and the legislature. 18 The Court exercised a power suggested by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78 some 15 years earlier when he remarked that ‘where the will of the legislature declared in statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people declared in the constitution, the judges ought to be governed by the latter, rather than the former’. 19 Jefferson’s biographer, Berstein (2003), rightly comments that 28 The Federal Circuit Courts 20 R B Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Folio Society edition with emendations, 2008, 156. 21 Letter Thomas Jefferson to Mrs Abigail Adams, 11 September 1804 in Lester Capon (ed), The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 278–80. 22 Letter, Jefferson to Monroe, 7 September 1797 in Paul Leicester Ford, The Works of Thomas Jefferson , vol VIII (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 339–40. 23 Peter Charles Hoffer and NEH Hull, Impeachment in America, 1635–1805 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 85–86. 24 United States Constitution, Article II, section 4. 25 See President Jefferson’s message of 3 February 1803 to the House of Representatives placing Pickering’s case before the House for consideration of impeachment in James D Richardson, A Compi-lation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents , vol 1 (Washington DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1905), 356. ‘Chief Justice Marshall faced a seemingly no-win situation.

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  International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court

  • David L. Sloss, Michael D. Ramsey, William S. Dodge(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  As discussed, see supra p. 34, Justice Story in dissent disagreed with Marshall’s view of the practices of nations. 290 See id. at 125–28. International Law in the Supreme Court to 1860 41 war an effect in this country it does not possess elsewhere.” 291 But the case involved no constitutional limitation on Congress, 292 and the ultimate question was the effect of the act declaring war. E. Constitutional Interpretation In some cases, the Supreme Court looked to international law to help interpret the Constitution, 293 although its practice was more scattered and opportunistic than with statutory interpretation. With respect to the division of authority between the federal government and the States, for example, the Supreme Court sometimes thought the law of nations was relevant and sometimes thought it was not. In Chisholm v. Georgia, one of the Court’s earliest cases, the seriatim opinions generally denied that the law of nations should be used to determine whether a State could be sued in federal court. 294 “From the law of nations little or no illustration of this subject can be expected,” Justice Wilson wrote. The United States was not a “society” of “States and Governments” to which the law of nations applied; it was “a nation.” 295 At the same time, Justice Wilson noted that the law of nations governed disputes between the States and that subjecting them to the jurisdiction of the federal courts would help ensure enforcement of that law. 296 Similarly, Chief Justice Jay observed that policing “the conduct of each State, relative to the laws of nations, and the performance of treaties” was one of the reasons the Constitution created “a national judiciary . . . responsible to the whole nation.” 297 On other questions of federalism, however, the Supreme Court did look for guid- ance to the law of nations.

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  The Supreme Court in American Politics

  • I. Unah(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The significance of Marbury v. Madison is that it declared an Act of Congress unconstitutional, thereby affirming judicial review and indepen- dence. Ironically, by rejecting a congressional grant of additional powers, the Court actually gained more power in terms of prestige and political influ- ence. But the idea of judicial review itself was neither new nor born in that case. For instance, in 1795, in the case of Van Horne’s Lessee v. Dorrance, Justice Paterson explained that in the American form of government [A] Constitution is the sun of the political system, around which all Legislative, Executive, and Judicial bodies must revolve. Whatever may be the case in other countries, yet in this there can be no doubt, that every act of the Legislature, repugnant to the Constitution, is absolutely void. 39 Similarly, James Iredell stated in Calder v. Bull (1798) that “If any act of Congress, or of the legislature of a state, violates . . . constitutional provisions, it is unquestionably void.” Iredell further noted that the authority to make such a declaration “is of a delicate nature” only to be exercised in “urgent” situa- tions. Thus, the justices were simply waiting for the appropriate or “urgent” case through which they can firmly establish judicial review. It was this princi- ple expressed by Justice Paterson in Van Horn’s Lesee and by Justice Iredell in Calder that Marbury v. Madison confirmed and institutionalized eight years later as the most wide-ranging grant of power to the American judiciary. Application of Judicial Review How did the Court exercise its power of judicial review in the aftermath of Marbury? In the years following the Marbury decision, the Supreme Court used its power of judicial review to further establish itself as a coequal gov- erning partner under the Constitution and to firmly declare the superiority of the federal government over the states.

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