Chapter One

One need understand only a few of its cases to understand the Supreme Court's role in our nation's history. But one must assuredly understand the case of Marbury v. Madison. This case established the authority of the federal courts to declare a law passed by Congress unconstitutional and therefore void. The vitally important legal principle of the case can be condensed into a sentence or two, and the justification for the doctrine espoused by Chief Justice John Marshall in his opinion for the Court can be comprehended in a page or two. But like so many abstractions standing alone, these tend to go in one ear and out the other when people have no regular need to repair to such doctrine. I think that a fuller understanding of the doctrine itself may be gained by a knowledge not only of the facts of the case but also of the historical setting.

Those who have seen the city of Washington in the early part of the twenty-first century, firmly ensconced as a metropolis of four million at the southern end of the eastern "urban corridor" of the United States, may have difficulty envisioning the city as it existed in 1803, the year the Supreme Court decided the case of Marbury v. Madison. The Constitution adopted by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 had provided for the creation of a "district" not exceeding ten miles square to become "the seat of the Government of the United States," but it had left the location of that district to Congress. Congress decided that the site of the government should be moved from New York to Philadelphia in December 1790, and ten years later that it should be moved again to the District of Co