Thoughts on the Origins of Judicial Review and the Development of the Doctrine during the period from 1775 to 1803: Abstract

Thoughts on the Origins of Judicial Review and the Development of the Doctrine during the Period from 1775 to 1803. 

By Nathan Zimmermann, ACP, CP, MA 

January 15, 2023 

Abstract: 

Today when people are asked about the Supreme Court of the United States most people mention famous Chief justices like Chief Justice Marshall, or Chief Justice Warren, and famous cases such as to cite only two examples Marbury v. Madison 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803) along with Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). A common perception especially among students in high school is that the Court sprang from the mind of John Marshall much in the same Athena was born of Zeus. What students often fail to realize is that John Marshall, was the thirteenth person to serve on the Court ascending to the center seat eleven years after John Jay’s appointment as the first Chief Justice of the United States. Furthermore, he followed in the footsteps of three or four other Chief Justice of the United States depending on whether President Washington’s appointment of Associate Justice William Cushing on January 26, 1796, which, he declined a week later after the Senate had confirmed him, is counted among them. The purpose is twofold: first, to provide a brief sketch outlining the evolution of the United States from a series of thirteen independent sovereign states into a confederacy and a dualistic federal republic. Second, the successful transition made by the United States from a confederacy on the verge of collapse in 1785 to a thriving and expanding republic in 1805 is due part to the role played by the Jay, Rutledge, Ellsworth, and Marshall Courts in tending the embryonic legal system within the United States during the period from 1789 to 1805.