Legal Principle of Judicial Review The purpose of this research is to examine the s

The term judicial review is familiar to virtually any moderately attentive student of American history. It achieved resonance from the moment the principle was enunciated in Marbury v. Madison, a Supreme Court case decided in 1803 that was the first to declare an act of Congress (Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, to be exact) unconstitutional. The details of the case are far less interesting than the principle that arose from it: In the waning days of his presidency, John Adams declared a number of "midnight appointments" to positions as justice of the peace. When John Madison became Jefferson's Secretary of State in 1801, he refused to honor the appointments. One of the failed JPs sued Madison for the commission, and the Supreme Court decided the case in 1803. Some or all parts of the background of the case are covered in encyclopedias and scholarly books about the period or the American judiciary. All accounts cite the institution of the principle of judicial review by the Supreme Court as the

decisive element of the case. The overriding constitutional principle embedded into the decision was this: Since the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land, it must have the weight to overrule laws made by Congress that conflict with it. The effect of Marbury v. Madison was to clarify the role of the judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular as a major branch of American government. The Court's duty and right under the Constitut

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le, one lawjournal article that connects landuse regulations with judicial review cites 27 references, ten of which are from Columbia Law Review articles written by five different commentators over a period of some 30 years.7 The significance of the example, which is by no means unique, is to point up the sense of order and consistency that emerges where treatment of the relevant issues is concerned. That is, one could show the list of citations accompanying the indexing of a particular article to a researcher and thereby provide him or her with a fairly strong sense of which journals and which commentators might prove fruitful areas of investigation on an aspect of the subject. One does not need specific titles, or even abstracts in many cases, to see such patterns and the fact that they imply a fairly wide range of coverage. A persistent characteristic of much information on the subject of judicial review is that the hub of relevant research in the current period will be less on the shelf stacks or in the individual bits of information such as articles in magazines and journals per se than in the reference section of the library. That is, one will be most likely to most profitably begin one's search for the scope and limit

Category: Government - L