Marbury V Madison Impact Essay

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Marbury v. Madison (1803) impact on the daily lives of American citizens
In 1803, Marbury v. Madison made the US Constitution as the supreme law, affirming the authority of the Court over judicial review. The U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the federal courts are allowed to overturn the decisions of the other arms of government in the event that they act contrary to the Constitution (GROSSMAN). This is one of those "checks and balances" that are the core of the national government's function.



In 1800, Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, beat John Adams, a Federalist in becoming America's third president. Right before Adam's retirement, he introduced new positions in the judiciary, which he gave to his political partners. After Jefferson became president, James Madison, the State Secretary, refused to submit the commissions responsible for allowing judges to go back to work. Some of those who had been appointed, in inclusion of William Marbury, took petitions to the Supreme Court. They asked for Madison to be forced into delivering those documents. John Marshall, the Chief Justice, wrote on behalf of the court that they had unanimously ruled that in spite Madison was acting against the law. However, the court had no power to force him to deliver those documents. The ruling also stated that part of the 1789 Judiciary Act was unconstitutional, as it gave the court the authority to give a writ of mandamus order (GROSSMAN; Bamzai, 1058). More than half a century will go by before the United States Supreme Court exercises its authority to make a judicial review in the case of Dred Scott again.

The decision and its modern meaning



The opinion, facts and circumstances in the Marbury case can be summarized briefly. Following Thomas Jefferson election as the very first President from the Republican Party in 1800, there were new judgeships created by the lame-duck Congress of Federalist. They were meant to be given to Federalists first, before handing over power to people of the Republican Party. The burden of business brought about by the change in presidential regimes hindered William Marbury from being handed the commission as a peace justice in Columbia District. After the Republicans refused to hand the commission, Marbury, acting with respect to the 1798 Judiciary Act (Section 13), made a writ of mandamus suit, forcing the Republicans to deliver, an original act in a Supreme Court case (Bamzai, 1059). The Chief Justice wrote the Court's unanimous opinion. The Court ruled that Marbury had been deprived of his lawful right to hold the office. Additionally, it was good to sue for the writ of mandamus. However, according to Section 13, the U.S. Congress had enlarged the jurisdiction of the Court unconstitutionally by improperly giving it the authority to give writs of mandamus. For this reason, Marbury was denied his writ application. In order for this decision to be made, the Chief Justice made a judicial review argument (which is still famous today), although then, the practice had a different name. In short, this argument stated that it was legitimate for the Court's authority to deny the enforcement of a statutory law contradicting the Constitution.

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This was with regard to the foundation of the Constitution in popular authority, which gave it supreme authority over ordinary statutes. Additionally, the Constitution, which was in writing, created three government branches, which were co-equal. The authority of each branch was restricted by enumeration (Tuomala, 315). Consequently, when there was a conflict between a statute and the Constitution, and the case had been presented to the Supreme Court, it was required that the Court chose the Constitution over the statute for the case to be resolved.



The precedent in the Marbury case had minor impact until the second half of the 1800s. Then, for several reasons, it was for the first time seen as a major stroke in politics, which had given the Supreme Court the last word with regard to interpreting the Constitution. Marshall's seminal biography by Albert J. Beveridge gave a clear description of the modern day orthodox view. Beveridge asserted that Marshall manipulated Marbury in asserting that within the Judiciary was the exclusive authority to state that a statute was unconstitutional, as well as announce that it was the Supreme Court that had the last word on what was constitutional (Beveridge, 32). This opinion was enthusiastically elaborated by Progressives in the early 1900s, such as Vernon L. Parrington, the historian who stated in his writings that Chief Justice Marshall, in Marbury, made a huge move to state that the Constitution was under the Court's sovereignty (O'Neill, 793). The notion that the Marbury case was a disguised political move which authorized that the legislature and executive had no authority as the final decision-makers regarding their constitutional authority was the textbook orthodoxy for more than half of the 1900s, and its illustrations were impossible to multiply. This notion was reinforced by Cooper v Aaron (1958), the case of Little Rock, Arkansas, where it was rued that Brown v Board of Education (1954) unification order amid resistance by the state. Cooper cited the Marbury case as authority for the basic doctrine stating that the federal Court has higher authority in interpreting Constitutional law, and hence that its Fourteenth Amendment exposition in Brown stood as the supreme federal law (O'Neill, 793). The Court recently restated this perspective of its authority.



After the Second World War, the U.S. judicial review enhanced the modern day judicial supremacy as well as the ad hoc harmonization of rival policy claims. The claims had also started in the second half of the 1800s and further developed during the 1930's New Deal jurisprudence. During the 1960s and 70s, the authority of the Supreme Court under the two Chief Justices, Warren Burger and Earl Warren, became more clear, contentious and had more global influence. Be the time it….....

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Works Cited

Bamzai, Aditya. "Marbury v. Madison and the Concept of Judicial Deference." Missouri Law Review 81.4 (2016): 1057-1074. Web.

Beveridge, Albert Jeremiah. The Life of John Marshall. Vol. 1. Houghton Mifflin, 1916. Print.

GROSSMAN, Joel. "The 200th Anniversary of Marbury v. Madison: The Reasons We Should Still Care About the Decision, and The Lingering Questions It Left Behind." (2003). Web.

Haworth, Aetna Life Ins Co V., and Marbury V. Madison. "JURISDICTIONAL DOCTRINES AND PROCEDURES." The State and Federal Courts: A Complete Guide to History, Powers, and Controversy (2017): 298.

Nelson, W.E. "Marbury V. Madison and the Establishment of Judicial Autonomy." Journal of Supreme Court History, vol. 27, no. 3, Nov. 2002, pp. 240-256. Web.

O'Neill, J. "Marbury v Madison at 200: Revisionist Scholarship and the Legitimacy of American Judicial Review." Modern Law Review, vol. 65, no. 5, Sept. 2002, pp. 792-802. Web.

Tuomala, Jeffrey C. "Marbury v. Madison and the Foundation of Law." Liberty University Law Review4.2 (2010): 297-336. Web.

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