Ramtin Arablui

And they thought in order to get that, the federal government ought to have more power.

They believed their still very young country needed a strong centralized government with lasting institutions that would be around much longer than elected officials.

Institutions like the courts.

Adams nominated a bunch of Federalist judges at the very end of his term, so-called midnight judges, as well as a new chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall.

This idea, judicial supremacy, gives the Supreme Court final say over what's constitutional and what's not.

And then everybody has to do what they decide.

The law of the land.

It's just not how things worked then.

But there was this other thing, a much more restricted power, that was on the table.

Judicial review.

The court gets to decide what's constitutional in a case, but the ruling doesn't extend beyond that specific case.

So it's the law of the case, but not the law of the land.

In 1803, the cousins, Chief Justice John Marshall and President Thomas Jefferson, met in court, going head-to-head in a case called Marbury v. Madison.

We won't get into all the details of the case, but in short, the Jefferson administration was being sued for refusing to acknowledge some of those midnight judges that John Adams had appointed right before leaving office.

William Marbury was one of them.

He and the other appointees were able to take the case directly to the Supreme Court, thanks to a provision in a federal law that Congress had passed more than a decade earlier.

And Marshall saw this as an opportunity.

Marshall wanted to flex his authority as the head of the judicial branch, but... He knows if he actually tries to order Jefferson, Jefferson's going to ignore him.

But there was one tool that Marshall could use.

The power of judicial review.