Marbury v. Madison*

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), is the foundational decision of American constitutional law, delivered by Chief Justice John Marshall for a unanimous Court. The dispute arose from the partisan transition of 1801: outgoing Federalist President John Adams appointed several "midnight judges" under the Judiciary Act of 1801 and the Organic Act for the District of Columbia, but the commissions of justices of the peace—including that of William Marbury—were not delivered before Thomas Jefferson took office. Jefferson's Secretary of State, James Madison, refused to deliver them. Marbury petitioned the Supreme Court directly for a writ of mandamus to compel delivery, invoking Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789.

Marshall structured the opinion around three questions: did Marbury have a right to the commission; if so, did the laws afford him a remedy; and was a mandamus from the Supreme Court the correct remedy. He answered the first two affirmatively—the appointment was complete upon signing and sealing, and the law provides a remedy for every vested legal right (citing the maxim ubi jus, ibi remedium). On the third, however, Marshall held that Section 13, insofar as it purported to grant the Supreme Court original jurisdiction to issue mandamus, unconstitutionally enlarged the original jurisdiction fixed by Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, which Congress could not expand by statute. The Court therefore lacked jurisdiction to grant the writ and dismissed Marbury's claim. The political genius of the ruling lay in denying relief to a Federalist litigant while simultaneously asserting a far greater judicial power against the Jefferson administration, which could not defy a judgment that ordered it to do nothing.

The enduring significance is Marshall's declaration that "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," and that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void. This articulated judicial review, though the term itself is not used in the Constitution; Marshall grounded it in the supremacy of a written constitution, the judicial oath, and the Supremacy Clause (Article VI). The principle was foreshadowed in Hamilton's Federalist No. 78. Marbury was not used to strike down another federal statute until Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), but it remains the cornerstone authority cited in landmark cases including Cooper v. Aaron (1958) and United States v. Nixon (1974). As of 2026 it stands unchallenged as the source of the federal judiciary's power of constitutional review.

For the FSOT and the U.S. Government section, Marbury is essential and high-frequency. Questions typically ask candidates to identify it as the origin of judicial review, to name Chief Justice John Marshall, to date it to 1803, and to connect it to the system of checks and balances and separation of powers. Comparative-government questions may contrast American judicial review (decentralized, exercised by all courts) with the centralized constitutional-court model of Germany or France, or with the Indian basic-structure doctrine of Kesavananda Bharati (1973). Expect distractors involving other Marshall Court cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824).