Judicial Review Paper
...ice named John Marshall. The new addition to the power of the Supreme Court made it more powerful than anyone could have ever imagined. Making judicial review real from the verdict in Marbury v. Madison was an extremely important and difficult decision that Marshall decided to take on; it changed the face of our national government forever and Marshall interpreted the Court’s power correctly. The power of judicial review is an awesome one and if it is used in the wrong way it could become very dangerous. When Justice Marshall decided the verdict in Marbury v. Madison which included the creation of judicial review he encountered many arguments. One of the questions that were asked about relating to judicial review was: if judicial review was so necessary, then why didn’t the founders include it in the constitution? According to American Government, “…the founders never intended for the courts to exercise so formidable a power. Nowhere in the Constitution, they note, is the power of judicial review explicitly granted. Nor do the records of the Constitutional Convention show that the delegates ever explicitly debated granting this power to the judiciary.” (Ceaser 489). If a person examines the convention closely they can find that this statement is incorrect by reading Federalist 78 where the Federalists explicitly state, “Whenever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution, it will be the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former.” (Ceaser 489). Justice Marshall decided in Marbury v. Madison that he would make sure that the judiciary of the U.S. was able to review laws so that they were abiding by the constitution as the Federalists had said. The Federalists did talk about how a law that interferes with the Constitution should be handled and that they concluded that it should be handled by the courts. Marbury v. Madison was possibly the most important court case ever to take place in the history of the United States government. Before the time of the court case there had be nothing like it. When the Supreme Court reviewed the appealed case and found that there was a mistake and the court went to issue a writ to correct the mistake, they couldn’t because the Constitution specified the Court’s original jurisdiction (Ceaser 491). As American Government states, “…the Court could not issue the writ because the legislation granted it that power was unconstitutional.” (Ceaser 491). When the Supreme Court denied that Congress had the ability to issue the writ, the Court not only corrected the false court case, but they secured themselves a much more important power, the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional (Ceaser 491). Justice Marshall developed some of the ideas created by Alexander Hamilton and interpreted the Court’s power of judicial review into the Constitution the correct way; changing American government in a huge way from that point on. Giving the Supreme Court the power of judicial review made the branch of national government much more powerful than it had ever been before. One factor that was a concern about this new power that the Supreme Court received was that the branch would take over other branches of government. American Government explains, “The counter majoritarian aspect if judicial review is most evident when the Supreme Court strikes down the actions of a coeq...