John Marshall

John Marshall was Chief Justice of the United States for thirty-four years and turned the Supreme Court from the weakest branch of the government into a coequal one. He was a Virginian, fought at Brandywine and wintered at Valley Forge, and came out of the war convinced that the states separately could not be trusted with anything important - a view he held against most of his own family connections, including his cousin Thomas Jefferson, whom he disliked for forty years. He was a congressman, a diplomat in the XYZ affair, and briefly Secretary of State before Adams appointed him to the Court in 1801, in the last weeks of a defeated administration. Marbury v. Madison in 1803 arose from that very transition, and he used it to establish judicial review: the proposition that it is emphatically the province of the courts to say what the law is, and that an act repugnant to the Constitution is void. He did it while ruling against the applicant, which left Jefferson with nothing to defy. McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 upheld implied federal powers and denied states the right to tax federal instruments; Gibbons v. Ogden read the commerce clause broadly; Fletcher v. Peck and Dartmouth College protected contracts against state legislatures. He also largely invented the practice of a single opinion for the Court instead of each justice speaking separately, which is what made its rulings authoritative. In Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 he held that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct community over which Georgia's laws had no force. Jackson's administration simply declined to enforce it, and the removal went ahead three years after Marshall's death. It is the clearest demonstration of the limit of the power he had built.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history