Marbury V. Madison and Judicial Review

Few Supreme Court decisions are as well known or loom as large in our nation's history as Marbury v. Madison. In revising the historiography of Marbury, Robert Clinton contends that few decisions have been more misunderstood, or misused, in the debates over judicial review.The 1803 decision is widely viewed as having established the doctrine of judicial review, which permits the Court to overturn acts of Congress that violate the Constitition; moreover, such judicial decisions are final, not subject to further appeal. Conventional wisdom maintains that Marbury dramatically enlarged the Court's powers and, thus, broke with established legal tradition.In this provocative book, Clinton argues that the accepted view of Marbury is ahistorical and emerges from nearly a century of misinterpretation by historians and by legal scholars. Drawing upon evidence from European, English, and colonial American sources, from Founding Fathers and the ratification debates, and from the history of the Supreme Court after Marbury, he demonstrates that the decision was anything but a radical departure from legal tradition.Ultimately, Clinton maintains, Marbury can support only a very narrow and precedent-bound conception of judicial review: that federal courts are entitled to void acts of Congress only when to do otherwise would violate constitutional restrictions on judical power. Nevertheless, the modern view of Marbury prevails, and Clinton's study analyzes how the misperception has evolved.