John Marshall : the man who made the Supreme Court /

Prior to 1801, the US Supreme Court was a weak branch of the government. Between 1789 and 1800, three chief justices were seated. The game of musical chairs ended in 1801 when John Marshall was sworn in as the fourth chief justice of the court. Marshall remained in office until his death in 1835. Over the years, the chief justice and his court brothers strengthened the court. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), it established the precedent of judicial review, making the judicial branch equal to the other two branches of government. Brookhiser, who has published seven books on the founders, gives clarity to the 34 years Marshall served. This work is organized into four sections. The first covers Marshall years before his appointment. The next three sections focus on the 34 years of his tenure. Brookhiser's final chapter, "Legacy," could stand on its own. The subtitle of the book, The Man Who Made the Supreme Court, hits the nail right on the head. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --John J. Fox, emeritus, Salem State University

A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT and Congress declare war on the federal courts, eliminating newly created judgeships and canceling the Supreme Court session so the court can't meet for more than a year. The chief justice, who considers the president a populist demagogue, fears further attacks on judicial independence. The president accuses his former vice president of treason, and the chief justice presides over the trial himself, upholding a subpoena that requires the president to turn over relevant evidence. And after the vice president is acquitted, the chief justice leads a court that represents the last bastion of resistance to mob rule, defending the sanctity of contracts against attacks from populist presidents and the states, upholding the power of Congress to regulate the national economy and forcing the president and state courts to acknowledge the supremacy of the Constitution. Chief Justice John Marshall's battles with Thomas Jefferson and then Andrew Jackson, the two populist presidents in question, seem freshly relevant in our age of renewed anxieties about the future of the American republic. And, as Richard Brookhiser's fine new biography, "John Marshall," makes clear, the polarization of the age of Marshall matched (or even surpassed) our current battles over the composition of the Supreme Court. What differed in Marshall's day was the great chief's ability to win over Republican justices appointed by his archrival, Thomas Jefferson, and to join him in a series of unanimous opinions. By persuading the justices to set aside their partisan differences and to speak in one voice, Marshall established the court as an emblem of bipartisan legitimacy in a polarized time. As Brookhiser's compact and balanced account makes clear, Marshall famously transformed the judicial branch into one fully equal to the president and Congress in stature and legitimacy. And he did so by declining to pick political fights he couldn't win in the short term while declaring broad constitutional principles that would shore up the authority of the courts in the long term. This narrative, familiar to law students, has certainly taken on new relevance in the age of Donald Trump, when battles between the president, the chief justice and the courts are once again provoking talk of constitutional crisis. Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review and the author of several books on the founding fathers, draws no present-day parallels, but it's impossible not to think of our current vexations when reviewing 19th-century Republican efforts to impeach Federalist judges. The House did indeed impeach a Federalist justice, Samuel Chase, for being "highly arbitrary, oppressive and unjust," but after Marshall testified for Chase, the Senate acquitted him. Congress then expanded the size of the Supreme Court from six justices to seven, to give Jefferson the chance to fill vacancies with Republicans. But Marshall won over the Republican justices by convincing them of the court's institutional legitimacy. At a time of tribalism and polarization, culminating in threats by the states to nullify federal laws and secede from the Union, Marshall's central idea, shared with his Federalist heroes George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, was that "we the people" of the United States as a whole are sovereign and united, as opposed to "we the people" of the individual states. "Our Constitution is not a compact" of states, Marshall wrote in an anonymous pamphlet defending his own opinion upholding Congress's power to charter the Bank of the United States. "It is the act of a single party. It is the act of [the] people of the United States." (Abraham Lincoln invoked the same argument in denying the South's power to secede from the Union.) In an opinion echoing Washington's Farewell Address, which had defined the United States as "one people," Marshall wrote an eloquent paean to national unity: "In war, we are one people. In making peace, we are one people. In all commercial regulations, we are one and the same people." Insisting that America was a republic rather than a direct democracy, he criticized Jefferson as a proto-Trumpian demagogue: "His great power . . . is chiefly acquired by professions of democracy. Every check on the wild impulse of the moment is [therefore] a check on his own power. . . . He looks, of course, with an ill will at an independent judiciary." Jefferson's allies, led by Senator Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, responded by proposing to attack judicial independence by limiting the tenure of federal judges, preventing the federal courts from hearing cases, making judges removable by Congress, allowing the Senate to overturn the Supreme Court and increasing the size of the court to 10 justices. Although Johnson was a populist legend for having killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, these proposals went nowhere because of the bipartisan unity on the court that Marshall managed to inspire. Could the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, who has embraced Marshall as his model, play a similar unifying role in defending the Constitution against populist threats to judicial independence today? That depends on his fellow justices. And although Brookhiser's biography reminds us that American politics has always been polarized, today the polarization threatens to transform the deliberations of the court. The life of Marshall reminds us of the urgent importance of Roberts's efforts to persuade his colleagues to unite around a shared commitment to defending the legitimacy of the court by rising above partisan politics.

A brief biography of a legendary chief justice.When John Marshall (1755-1835) was sworn in as chief justice in 1801, writes National Review senior editor and biographer Brookhiser (Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, 2014, etc.), the Supreme Court met in a small committee room of the U.S. Capitol under the House of Representatives, a strong indication that the judiciary was the weakest of the three branches of the federal government. Yet before his death more than three decades later, "he and the Court he led hadlaid down principles of laws and politics that still apply." The oldest of 15 children, Marshall had only two years of formal schooling; his true education came with his service under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Marshall thought Washington was "the greatest Man on earth" and used Washington's selfless patriotism as a guide for the rest of his life. Following the war, Marshall established a law practice and served as a Virginia ratifying convention delegate, congressman, diplomat, and secretary of state. His lengthy tenure as chief justice was marked by vigorous defenses of the sanctity of contracts (Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819), the supremacy of the federal judiciary (Marbury v. Madison, 1803), and the protection of federal institutions from state interference (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819). Yet more important than the individual decisions, notes Brookhiser, were the "dignity" that Marshall gave to the Supreme Court and his defense of the Constitution "as the people's supreme act." As for the man himself, Marshall was an affable sort who enjoyed his madeira and was devoted to his long-suffering wife, Polly. The author also provides absorbing character sketches of several of Marshall's all-but-forgotten legal contemporaries, including Luther Martin, William Pinkney, and Samuel Chase.Brookhiser's book may be overshadowed by Joel Richard Paul's recently published Without Precedent, a lengthy and well-received study of Marshall's life and times. Nevertheless, those looking for a concise, informative, and at times entertaining biography of our nation's fourth chief justice would do well to read this one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.