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Marbury v. Madison
In 1801, outgoing president John Adams appointed William Marbury to the judiciary. The following day, the appointment was confirmed by the Senate. When Jefferson took command of the White House the day after that, he refused to send Marbury his commission, thus preventing that latter from assuming his appointment to the judiciary. Marbury sued Jefferson’s Secretary of State James Madison, thus establishing the case Marbury v. Madison, upon which the Supreme Court gave its decision in 1803. This paper will recount the background, major events sand effects that Marbury v. Madison (1803) had on American history.
Thomas Jefferson viewed Adams’ last minute appointments of 42 justices of the peace as an “outrage on decency” (Library of Congress, 2018). Considering that they were political enemies, Jefferson’s outrage was understandable: Adams had filled the new offices with justices he knew would be loyal to him and the Federalist Party. As a Democratic-Republican in support of decentralized government, Jefferson had no liking for what he viewed as Adams’ unethical attempt at a Federalist legacy in government—so Marbury’s commission (along with three others) which had not yet been delivered when Jefferson took office were stopped dead in their tracks with the new President refusing to honor them, considering them null now that Adams was no longer in charge of the Executive.
Marbury sued and...
To explain, the Court established the principle of judicial review in the case of Marbury v. Madison by ruling that the Court had the right to judge unconstitutional and therefore unlawful an act of the executive or legislative branches of government that went against the Constitution. This meant that the Constitution was to be considered as law rather than as a set of guiding principles. It also meant that the judicial branch of government had the final say in determining how the law/Constitution should be interpreted. Thus, the Court ruled in favor of itself. However, the Court only seemingly ruled in favor of Marbury because, while indicating that Madison acted illegally in refusing his commission, the Court noted that it itself had no jurisdiction over the matter since the jurisdiction supplied it by Article 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 was itself unconstitutional as it was an expansion of power outside the scope of the what the Constitution originally intended in Article III, which gave the Supreme Court only appellate jurisdiction—not original jurisdiction (Epstein, 2014).
Although Marbury never obtained his writ, a victory could be declared for the judiciary—a point which Jefferson detested as he felt it gave the judiciary tyrannical power over the other two…
References
Epstein, R. (2014). The classical liberal constitution: The uncertain quest for limited government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Library of Congress. (2018). Marbury v. Madison. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/marbury.html
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