John Marshall

John Marshall

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“”[A] Constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it. Its course cannot always be tranquil.

—Chief Justice John Marshall, Cohens v. Virginia majority opinion.

John Marshall (1755–1835) was an American Founding Father most famous for his work as the fourth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835. Before this, he served as the Secretary of State under President John Adams and a US Representative from his home state of Virginia. This makes him one of the few Americans to have served in all three branches of the federal government, and his actions have continued to shape how the US federal government interacts with state governments.

He is most remembered for his work in the US Supreme Court, on which he was a very influential figure able to sway his fellow justices. In 1803, he pushed for and wrote the Court's opinion on the Marbury v. Madison case, in which the Court upheld the principle of judicial review. This established that US courts have the ability to evaluate and potentially invalidate federal and state laws based on whether they adhered to the United States Constitution. Judicial review is a core part of American separation of powers.

Marshall's decisions also expanded the power of the federal government versus the states, and he specifically helped put the "Supreme" in the Supreme Court. In McCulloch v. Maryland, Marshall's opinion, unanimously backed by his fellow justices, held that Congress has powers not specifically elaborated in the Constitution and could therefore establish a national bank free from state taxation. In Cohens v. Virginia, Marshall and his fellow justices ruled that the US Supreme Court had the authority to review cases from state supreme courts. In Gibbons v. Ogden, the Court held that Congress had the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate means of transportation. Congress has since applied this to railroads, freeways and television and radio broadcasts.

In one of the darkest moments of American history, Marshall wrote the majority opinion in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia case, holding that Georgia could not allow its citizens to violate treaties with the Cherokee, or any other Native American Nation, as the treaties had been negotiated by the US federal government. This wasn't a dark moment because of Marshall; he made the right call here. No, things went sideways because the US president at the time was one Andrew Jackson, who was determined to expropriate land from Native Americans. Jackson thus refused to enforce the decision and allowed Georgia militias to begin forcing the Cherokee off their tribal lands, beginning a series of events which would culminate in their forced removal in 1838.

When Marshall died in 1835, President Jackson nominated Roger Taney to replace him, and this nomination passed the US Senate. Taney proved to be a far inferior justice, authoring the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which upheld slavery in all US land, denied the legality of Black citizenship, and set the stage for the American Civil War by invalidating the Missouri Compromise. One guy makes a lot of difference.

A controversial figure in his day, he is quite possibly the most important voice of the Federalist cause from his era. John Adams said in 1825 “The proudest act of my life was the gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States.” Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, viewed him as "very irregular and very censurable."

The man who created judicial review

John Marshall is most famous for being the person who created the concept of judicial review in the United States, specifically through the case Marbury v. Madison. Essentially, this means the Supreme Court has the power to overturn even laws passed by Congress if they are found to be unconstitutional, because "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

Essentially, a few days before Adams left office and was replaced with Jefferson, whom Adams hated, he appointed several people to the lower courts who agreed with him politically. However, the commissions in question were not able to be delivered before Adams left office, and Jefferson ordered his Secretary of State, James Madison, to only deliver some commissions, specifically to judges he liked. One of the people appointed by Adams who never got a commission was William Marbury, who was outraged that Madison refused to allow him to do a job he had gotten.

Many have said that Marshall had a massive conflict of interest regarding this case: You see, Marshall was Secretary of State at the time the Adams Administration underwent the aforementioned plan. Because of this, it was his job to give people like Marbury the very commissions Madison refused to give him. On this notion, Britannica states:

Some scholars have questioned whether Marshall should have removed himself from the case because of his prior service as Adams’ secretary of state (1800–01). Certainly, later judicial standards would have called for recusal, but at the time only financial connections to a case led judges to step aside, as Marshall did in suits regarding Virginia lands in which he had an interest. The Democratic-Republicans (progenitor of the Republican Party), always quick to criticize Marshall, did not even raise the issue of the propriety of his sitting in the case.

Marbury v. Madison made simple

Jefferson was outraged, writing on this ruling that "The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they may please." The notion was controversial and has been used by both the left and the right on the court to achieve similarly controversial ends. What scholars refer to as the Lochner era, named after the case Lochner v. New York where this point in history started, saw conservatives on the court use this power to stop essentially any regulation governments passed. Meanwhile, the Warren Court, named after Chief Justice Earl Warren, used this power to desegregate public schools, force the government to provide a lawyer to those who cannot afford one, strike down laws against birth control, and create the modern notion of "one person, one vote."

One of the infamous moments in United States history came from an example of judicial review being ignored, that being the Trail of Tears. Marshall, who was still on the court, ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that the land of Native Americans doubled as sovereign nations which states had no right to rule. After this ruling, both then-President Andrew Jackson and the states which were engaging in these practices did nothing, and essentially pretended the ruling never occurred. Jackson is even alleged to have said "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." Still, on the other end, another infamous moment in United States history, Dred Scott v. Sandford also saw the Supreme Court use its power of judicial review to declare something unconstitutional, in that case the Missouri Compromise.

Putting the "federal" in federalist

Another important case Marshall started was McCulloch v. Maryland, which created the notion of implied powers in the Constitution and determined that federal law was supreme.

The case came out after The Second Bank of the United States was opened in the state of Maryland, which then passed a law saying that all banks not chartered by the state had to pay a tax. James McCulloch, who headed this bank, was outraged and sued the state, which made its way to the Supreme Court. The court ruled that Maryland had no power to tax the bank because it would be a violation of the supremacy clause, and that Congress had the power to open a National Bank despite said power not being explicitly given in the Constitution. Due to its importance in determining what powers the federal government has, it has been called "one of [Marshall's] most important decisions regarding the expansion of Federal power."