The duel between the former Secretary of the Treasury and the Vice-President provided high drama, but far more important was an event that had occurred the year before in Washington. This event was a Supreme Court decision written by Chief Justice Marshall, the decision known as Marbury vs. Madison. It established the principle that the Supreme Court may declare unconstitutional any law passed by Congress that conflicts with the Constitution. This principle has become so well accepted today that we can hardly realize it ever had to be stated. Its effect, however, was to strengthen the system of checks and balances between the three main branches of our government.

Marbury was an obscure justice of the peace, appointed by President Adams just before his term expired. The lame-duck Federalist administration went out of office before Marbury received his commission, and Marbury appealed to the Supreme Court to force James Madison, the new Secretary of State, to give it to him. The Supreme Court declared that Marbury deserved his commission but that it could not grant it. The reason was that the law saying the Court could do this was contrary to the Constitution and therefore invalid. In the portion of the decision that follows, Chief Justice Marshall argues the principle that Congress may not give powers not specifically authorized by the Constitution to the courts or to anyone else.

Excerpts from John Marshall’s Decision

The question whether an act, repugnant [opposed] to the Constitution, can become the law of the land is a question deeply interesting to the United States but, happily, not of an intricacy proportioned to its interest. It seems only necessary to recognize certain principles, supposed to have been long and well established, to decide it.

That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness is the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected. The exercise of this original right is a very great exertion; nor can it, nor ought it, to be frequently repeated. The principles, therefore, so established are deemed fundamental. And as the authority from which they proceed is supreme, and can seldom act, they are designed to be permanent.

This original and supreme will organizes the government and assigns to different departments their respective powers. It may either stop here or establish certain limits not to be transcended by those departments.

The government of the United States is of the latter description. The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken or forgotten, the Constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested that the Constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it or that the legislature may alter the Constitution by an ordinary act.

Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The Constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.

If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law; if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.

Certainly, all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and, consequently, the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void.