You may know this one only by name, given the catchy alliteration and the fact that we’ve all had a lot on our minds since 1803. Nevertheless, this was the single most important decision ever handed down by the Court because it established the right of judicial review, without which there wouldn’t be any Supreme Court decisions worth knowing by name.
The plot gets complicated, but it’s worth the effort. John Marbury had been appointed a district-court judge by outgoing president John Adams. In the hubbub of changing administrations, however, the commission—the actual piece of paper—never got delivered. When the new secretary of state, James Madison, refused to honor the appointment, Marbury appealed to the Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus, which would force the new administration to give him his commission. Now forget Marbury, Madison, and the meaning of the word “mandamus” for the moment; what was really going on was a power struggle between John Marshall, newly appointed chief justice of the Court and an unshakable Federalist, and Thomas Jefferson, newly elected president of the United States and our most determined anti-Federalist. Marbury’s had been only one of innumerable last-minute judgeships handed out by the lame-duck Federalists in an effort to “pack the courts” before the anti-Federalists, who had just won the elections by a landslide, swept them into permanent oblivion. Understandably, the anti-Federalists were furious at what they considered a dirty trick. To make matters even worse, Marshall himself was one of these so called midnight judges, appointed just before Jefferson’s inauguration; and, as it happened, it was Marshall’s brother who had neglected to deliver Marbury’s commission in the first place.
By all standards of propriety, Marshall should have been vacationing in Acapulco while this case was being argued. Instead, he wrote the opinion himself, managing to turn it into the classic mix of law and politics that approaches art. First, he declared that Marbury was theoretically entitled to his commission. Second—and here’s the twister—he denied Marbury’s petition on the grounds that the part of the law that allowed the Supreme Court to issue writs of mandamus in this sort of case was unconstitutional, and therefore null and void.
The results: (1) Marbury got to keep his dignity, if nothing else; (2) Jefferson was appeased because Marbury didn’t get the job; (3) the Court avoided a confrontation with the president it would certainly have lost, since it didn’t have the power to enforce a writ of mandamus even if it had had the power to issue one; and (4) most important, the Court officially established itself as the final arbiter of the constitutionality of any law passed by Congress, and it did so by righteously denying itself a power. This last point made the Court the effective equal—in a checks-and-balances sort of way—of both Congress and the president. And let’s not forget that (5) Marshall came away from the case looking like the soul of judicial integrity, not only because he’d rejected a Federalist place-seeker, but because the law he’d overturned was a Federalist law. This left him free to spend the next thirty-five years interpreting the Constitution and shaping American history according to his own brilliant, but decidedly Federalist, views. McCULLOCH v. MARYLAND (1819)
Why should you care about a case that prevented the state of Maryland from taxing notes issued by the Second Bank of the United States? Because what was really in question was the constitutionality of the Bank itself, and the Bank brouhaha was symbolic of the major preoccupation of the day: Who was going to run this show, the federal government or the individual states? Had John Marshall not had his way, we might have ended up as a loose confederation of states that couldn’t see eye-to-eye on anything, and that certainly wouldn’t have had a prayer of pooling their resources to produce a Miss America pageant.
The controversy over the establishment of the First Bank of the United States was still smoldering in the hearts of states’ rights advocates when this new outrage came along. They argued that by incorporating the Second Bank, Congress had exceeded its constitutional powers and that, in any event, the states could tax whatever they wanted to as long as it was on their turf.
Marshall, who, as you’ll recall, was an ardent Federalist with a vision of a strong Union, scored the biggest win of his career with this one. In upholding the constitutionality of the Bank’s incorporation, he managed to fire off several statements that subsequently became classics of American law. For instance, he deftly worked the opposition’s argument—that nowhere in the constitution was Congress specifically empowered to charter a bank—into the premise that the Constitution speaks in a broad language so that it can be “adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” He also claimed that the sovereign people had made the central government supreme over all rivals within the sphere of its powers, and concluded that the Maryland tax was invalid because “the power to tax is the power to destroy,” and it just wouldn’t make sense to let a supreme power be destroyed by an inferior one. He neatly summed up the whole thing:
Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution are constitutional.
Thus, with a few well-chosen words, Marshall not only proclaimed, once and for all, the supremacy of national over state government (well, there was still the Civil War to come, but the theory, at least, was now down on paper), but also established both the federal government’s—and, by extension, the Court’s—right to make what was henceforth to be known as a “loose construction” of the Constitution. Which, of course, is another way of saying it’s anybody’s ball game. DRED SCOTT v. SANFORD (1857)
Yes, Dred Scott was a slave; no, he had nothing to do with John Brown or Harpers Ferry. Nearly everyone seems to have a mental block here, so let’s get the story straight, even if it is a bit of a downer. Dred Scott was a Missouri black man who sued his master, claiming that he had been automatically freed by having been taken first to Illinois, a free state, then to the Minnesota Territory, where slavery had been forbidden by the Missouri Compromise.
The case was a real cliff-hanger; not only did the Court take forever to decide, but, given the year, there was, naturally, a lot more at stake than one man and a few legal loopholes. The whole country was waiting to see who would ultimately get control of the new western territories. If the slave states succeeded in institutionalizing slavery there, it would mean more votes and political power for the agrarian South. If the antislavery states got their way, it would mean an even greater concentration of power for the industrial North; in which case, the South threatened, it would secede.
Finally, Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the opinion for a predominantly Southern Court. First, he ruled, Negroes were not citizens of the United States (they had, as he put it, “no rights any white man was bound to respect”) and were not, therefore, entitled to go around suing people. Petition denied. The Court could have stopped there, but it chose to go for the extra point: Scott, it declared, couldn’t possibly have been freed by his stay in the Minnesota Territory because Minnesota wasn’t free territory. In fact, Congress had no right to create free territory since, in so doing, it had violated the Fifth Amendment by depriving Southerners of their right to property. Ergo, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, null, and void. The South, naturally, saw this as the Supreme Court’s shining hour, while Northerners began to mutter that maybe there was a higher law than the Constitution, after all. HAMMER v. DAGENHART (1918)