Bobby Lipkin wrote: > I'd be surprised if > anyone in the generation ratifying the Constitution could have anticipated > Marshall's revolutionary use of judicial review/supremacy throughout his > tenure as Chief Justice.
Bobby, I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on what you have in mind here. Marbury was an awfully minor exercise of power, especially when combined with Stuart v. Laird. Marshall could not have been a "supremacist" in the sense that he held his Court over the other branches of the national government; after all, no other national laws were struck down. If he was any sort of supremacist he was a national supremacist rather than a judicial supremacist, it seems to me. For a more skeptical view of Marshall's tenure I would suggest Mark A. Graber, "The Problematic Establishment of Judicial Review," in The Supreme Court in American Politics: New Institutionalist Interpretations 28, 34 (Howard Gillman & Cornell W. Clayton eds., 1999), Mark A. Graber, Federalist or Friends of Adams: The Marshall Court and Party Politics, 12 Stud. Am. Pol. Dev. 229, 261-62 (1998), and Michael Klarman's "How Great Were the 'Great' Marshall Court Decisions?" 87 Va. L. Rev. 1111 (Oct. 2001). Howard Gillman USC
