Paralegal Guide: Marbury v. Madison

Perhaps no other legal case in American history has had the far-reaching consequences of Marbury v. Madison.  Decided in the early days of the American republic in 1803, the case helped solidify principles of American government such as checks and balances and constitutionality versus unconstitutionality.  The case birthed the judicial review process, and as a result, there’s not a law on the books today in the United States that hasn’t been affected by Marbury.

The origins of the case lie in the Federalist attempt, under John Adams, to stack the courts with Federalist appointees.  When the Democratic-Republicans swept into power in the 1800 election, with Thomas Jefferson elected to the Presidency, a number of issues remained unresolved.  Adams court appointee William Marbury demanded that his commission be delivered by the new government, while new Secretary of State James Madison refused.  At this political moment, if Chief Justice John Marshall attempted to order Madison to deliver the commission, the Jefferson administration would refuse, and if they didn’t order it, then legislative power would be deemed superior to judicial power.

The Supreme Court realized that this raised a number of Constitutional issues.  First, they needed to ask if Article III of the Constitution– the section dealing with judicial powers– meant.  Was it a minimum of judicial power that could be expanded on?  Or was it a statement of the limits of judicial power, naming all the federal courts that could occur?  If the latter is true, and Congress attempts to modify it, does legislative mandate or the Constitution more important?  And when conflict arises, how is the conflict between the Constitution and contemporary law and law-makers resolved?

John Marshall decided that while the laws indicate that Marbury should have been delivered his commission, the Judiciary Act of 1789 was inherently unconstitutional, and was struck down.  It was at this point that the judicial branch became regarded as the ultimate arbiter on constitutionality.  A principle of judicial review was established, giving the Supreme Court the ability to stop the passage of unconstitutional laws.  This gives a lot of power to the judicial branch– something Thomas Jefferson worried about– but the Supreme Court has been very restrained in its judicial reviews since.  In fact, there has been but one time when the Supreme Court has struck down a federal statute since, which we’ll discuss a bit later.

More importantly, Marbury v. Madison established a legal hierarchy in the United States, with the Constitution reigning as supreme law.  Below that, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches make and evaluate the law within the framework of the Constitution, all possessing roughly equal power.  To prevent one branch from becoming more powerful, the various branches all check each other’s power; this is the familiar chart of checks and balances that every American learns in high school government class.

There has been some concern about the powers of judicial review since.  Both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were prominent critics of the principle.  They pointed out that while the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, the judicial review process makes the judicial branch the principal protectors of the Constitution, and thus they are given a privileged position over the other two branches of government.  This is doubly worrying because the Supreme Court is made up of august individuals appointed to life terms by executives and confirmed by legislators.  Unlike the legislative and executive branches, they aren’t subject to the rigors of democratic evaluation and reevaluation.  Lincoln cited the one time since Marbury in which judicial review was used to strike a previously existing law.  This was during the notorious Dred Scott v. Sandford case, widely considered a low point of American democracy, in which the Supreme Court held up a wide array of pro-slavery principles.  Notably, they overturned the Missouri Compromise which provided for equal numbers of slave states and free states.  The Compromise, they argued, deprived slave owners of their property rights over their slaves and thus violated the Fifth Amendment’s implied guarantee of private property protection.

However, the American legal community has since reached a consensus, and judicial review is broadly accepted within the legal and political sphere.  The idea has been exported abroad, with numerous other nations integrating judicial review processes into their legal and constitutional architecture.  But perhaps the best way to remember it is to think of it as the first major test of the U.S. Constitution.  It was an era in which the very nature of concepts like “Constitution” and “democracy” were still experimental, and the ideas of the founders were still radical.  And the political system emerged from Marbury with a new sense of direction and a new sense of how to implement the grand ideas of the young republic.

FURTHER READING

Read the original text of the case here, hosted by Justia.

Legal scholar Joel Grossman wrote this thoughtful piece about Marbury on the occasion of its 200th anniversary.