Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Issue: Who can ultimately decide what the law is?

Result: "It is explicitly the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is."

Importance: This decision gave the Court the ability to strike down laws on the grounds that they are unconstitutional (a power called judicial review).

Impact: Marbury v. Madison remains the single most important decision in American constitutional law. It established American judges' authority to review the constitutionality of Congress's legislative acts, and to this day the Supreme Court's power to review the constitutionality of American laws at both the federal and state level "is generally rested upon the epic decision of Marbury v. Madison."

Although the Court's opinion in Marbury established judicial review in American federal law, it did not create or invent it. Some 18th-century British jurists had argued that British courts had the power to circumscribe Parliament, and the principle became generally accepted in Colonial America—especially in Marshall's native Virginia—due to the idea that in America only the people were sovereign, rather than the government, and therefore that the courts should only implement legitimate laws. By the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, American courts' "independent power and duty to interpret the law" was well established. Nevertheless, Marshall's opinion in Marbury was the power's first announcement and exercise by the Supreme Court. It made the practice more routine, rather than exceptional, and prepared the way for the Court's opinion in the 1819 case McCulloch v. Maryland, in which Marshall implied that the Supreme Court was the supreme interpreter of the U.S. Constitution. Marbury also established that the power of judicial review covers actions by the executive branch – the President and his cabinet members. However, American courts' power of judicial review over executive branch actions only extends to matters in which the executive has a legal duty to act or refrain from acting, and does not extend to matters that are entirely within the President's discretion, such as whether to veto a bill or whom to appoint to an office. This power has been the basis of many subsequent important Supreme Court decisions in American history, such as the 1974 case United States v. Nixon, in which the Court held that President Richard Nixon had to comply with a subpoena to provide tapes of his conversations for use in a criminal trial related to the Watergate scandal, and which ultimately led to Nixon's resignation. Although it is a potent check on the other branches of the U.S. government, the power of judicial review was rarely exercised in early American history. After deciding Marbury in 1803, the Supreme Court did not strike down another federal law until 1857, when the Court struck down the Missouri Compromise in the case Dred Scott v. Sandford, a ruling that contributed to the outbreak of the American Civil War.