Judicial Review

Museums, Est. 1969

Judicial review is the principle that the courts have the power to rule on the constitutionality of legislation. The first instance of judicial review resulting in a law being declared unconstitutional took place in North Carolina in 1787. In the case of Bayard v. Singleton, a North Carolina court ruled that every citizen had the right to a jury trial where property rights were involved, and that a North Carolina law allowing certain suits to be dismissed violated the North Carolina constitution.

In Madison v. Marbury in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle that the United States Supreme Court would be the final arbiter of constitutionality. This what Thomas Jefferson had wanted at first, but when the Supreme Court under the Federalist Marshall frustrated many of his administration's objectives, he reversed course, and by 1815 was advocating that each of the three branches of the federal government should be its own final judge. What had come to pass was what some opponents of the constitution had argued during the ratification process, but by 1815 it was too late.

Although accepted in practice throughout the country, the principle of judicial review was controversial for many years. As late as 1825, John Bannister Gibson, a justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, wrote in a dissenting opinion on Eakin v. Raub that judicial review should be limited.