Woodward, 1819) and made way for ample national powers that were not hampered by artificially restricted understandings of Congress’s constitutional authority ( McCulloch v. Madison, 1803) secured the protection of private rights even in contractual or charter relationships with state governments ( Fletcher v. Marshall instituted the practice of issuing a single opinion of the Court-often written by him-and in those opinions his Court established the responsibility of the judiciary to prefer the Constitution to conflicting ordinary laws ( Marbury v. By the time of his death 34 years later, the federal judiciary’s stature as a branch of government coequal with the executive and legislative was securely built. When Marshall came to the Supreme Court, its place in our constitutional order was still relatively insignificant. At just 45, with no prior judicial experience, Marshall now came to the center chair on the highest court in the land, just as his cousin Jefferson-the leader of the Republicans (forerunners of today’s Democrats)-came to the presidency in the first peaceful change of partisan control of our national government. Elected as a Federalist, he was appointed secretary of state about a year later, and chief justice about a year after that. On his return home he was persuaded by George Washington to run for the House of Representatives.

government and the “ XYZ Affair” made him famous overnight. The attempt on the part of French officials to elicit bribes from the Americans was exposed in Marshall’s dispatches to the U.S. About a decade later he was sent by President John Adams to Paris as one of three ministers to revolutionary France. Marshall quickly established a successful legal practice in the new state capital of Richmond and became involved in state politics, serving in the legislature and in the state convention that ratified the U.S.

Chief justice john marshall