This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Judicial review, the power of American courts to strike down a law as unconstitutional, is not written into the Constitution's text. It was established by the Supreme Court itself, in a 1803 case that began, oddly enough, with a piece of undelivered mail. In the final days of his administration, President John Adams appointed William Marbury as a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia, and the Senate confirmed the appointment, but the commission documenting it was never delivered before Adams left office. The incoming secretary of state, James Madison, acting for the new president Thomas Jefferson, refused to deliver it. Marbury sued directly at the Supreme Court, asking for a writ of mandamus ordering Madison to hand over the commission, under a power Congress had given the Court in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion, issued in February 1803, walked through the case in an unusual order. Marbury did have a right to his commission, Marshall wrote, and the law did generally provide a remedy for that kind of wrong. But the Court, Marshall concluded, could not actually issue the writ Marbury wanted, because the provision of the Judiciary Act that appeared to grant the Supreme Court this original jurisdiction conflicted with the narrower jurisdiction the Constitution itself set out. Faced with that conflict, Marshall declared, a law repugnant to the Constitution is void, and it is the judiciary's role to say so. Marbury lost his commission. The Supreme Court gained a power no one had definitively established it held before, the authority to invalidate an act of Congress, a ruling that has shaped the balance between America's three branches of government ever since.