Albert Beveridge

Here, even here, we stand on the brink of fate.

I did not expect, sir, to find the doctrine of the power of the courts to annul the laws of Congress as unconstitutional, so seriously insisted on....

This is the tree where despotism lies concealed....

We had our Jacobins and disorganizers, who saw no difference between a King and a President; and, as the people of France had put down their King, they thought the people of America ought to put down their President.

There are many now willing to spill their blood to defend that Constitution.

Proper restraint upon Congress, said Randolph, was not found in a pretended power of the Judiciary to veto legislation, but in the people themselves, who at the ballot box could "apply the Constitutional corrective.

That is the true check; every other is at variance with the principle that a free people are capable of self-government." Then the imperious Virginian boldly charged that the Federalists intended to have John Marshall and his associates on…

The decision of a Constitutional question must rest somewhere.

Shall it be confided to men immediately responsible to the people, or to those who are irresponsible?...

Whenever in any country judges are dependent, property is insecure." What had happened in France?

The constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.

The value to a democracy of a steadying force was not then so well understood as it is at present, but the Chief Justice fully appreciated it and determined at all hazards to make the National Judiciary the stabilizing power that it has…

But despite the peril, Marshall resolved to act.

Better to meet the issue now, come what might, than to evade it.

Madison, Marshall made the principle of judicial supremacy over legislation as much a part of our fundamental law as if the Constitution contained these specific words: the Supreme Court shall have the power to declare invalid any act of…

The theory of the Chief Justice that Section 13 of the old Judiciary Law was unconstitutional was absolutely new, and it was as daring as it was novel.

For the reasons stated, Marshall resolved to take that step which, for courage, statesmanlike foresight, and, indeed, for perfectly calculated audacity, has few parallels in judicial history.

It was not, then, Marshall's declaring an act of Congress to be unconstitutional that was innovating or revolutionary.

The extraordinary thing was the pretext he devised for rendering that opinion--a pretext which, it cannot be too often recalled, had been unheard of and unsuspected hitherto.

That is to say, when the Constitution conferred upon the Supreme Court original jurisdiction in specified cases, it thereby excluded all others--denied to Congress the power to add to the jurisdiction thus affirmatively granted.

After writing nearly nine thousand words, he now reached the commanding question: Can the Supreme Court of the United States invalidate an act which Congress has passed and the President has approved?

Marshall avowed that the Supreme Court can and must do that very thing, and in so doing made Marbury vs.

If two laws conflict, the courts must decide between them.

Our children see this and learn to imitate it....