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Marbury v. Madison: How History Has Changed John Marshall's Interpretation of the Constitution—A Response to Winfield H. Rose

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2004

Christopher B. Budzisz
Christopher B. Budzisz
Affiliation:
Loras College
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Extract

In his April 2003 PS: Political Science and Politics article “Marbury v. Madison: How John Marshall Changed History by Misquoting the Constitution,” Winfield H. Rose presents an argument in which Chief Justice Marshall knowingly distorted the meaning of the Constitution for strategic gain. The strategic gain was the creation of judicial review (the power of the Court to invalidate acts of other branches of government as violative of the Constitution). The key means to achieve this goal was to intentionally misquote Article III in the Court's most famous of cases, Marbury v. Madison (1803). Rose offers his argument as the product of a new discovery (that of detecting Marshall's misquotation), and this discovery as the product of a fresh reading of the case. The reading is a “fresh” one because Rose looks anew at the actual text of the decision and does not rely on the accepted “textbook wisdom” of the case. He calls us rightly to revisit the case and follow him beyond the “conventional textbook wisdom” regarding the case. However, Rose's analysis fails in the end precisely because it remains so wedded to the textbook wisdom on Marbury and judicial review that he advises against.

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PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 2004 , pp. 385 - 389
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

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