How Did John Marshall Influence The Supreme Court

At its inception, the Supreme Court was a vague idea created by tired delegates at the Constitutional Convention. Today, the judiciary is arguably the strongest branch in government. The person responsible for the inception of such a strong judicial branch is John Marshall. With his decisions in the Supreme Court, John Marshall used his Constitutional interpretation to grant powerful jurisdiction over the federal government, and to ensure a republic of the people rather than being in complete control of rich white men for the entirety of America. These decisions led Marshall to shape the Supreme Court by his granting of power to match the other branches of government to the modern age. To recap, the decisions John Marshall made in the Supreme

As he was born as the first of fifteen in a family engrossed with politics, he rose above his younger siblings and attended Campbell Academy or Westmoreland Academy with his future political acquaintance, James Monroe. Before his education was completed, he was influenced by his father’s friend George Washington, whom his father helped the young Washington survey land and American war hero, to join the Revolutionary War. When he joined the ranks of the army, he was initially appointed as Lieutenant of the Culpeper Minutemen, which was eventually absorbed into the Eleventh Regiment of Virginia. Throughout the war, he was promoted to Captain for his victory in prominent battles of the war. Shortly after the war ended, he went back to school for study in law, where he finally completed his law degree at the College of William and Mary and began practicing law in Richmond, Virginia. This helped pave the way for Marshall when refusing to give into French forces when negotiating an amity treaty with the French, which built a reputation on the behalf of Marshall. This reputation got President John Adams to appoint him as Secretary of the Treasury in 1800. During the last twenty-four hours of President Adams, Adams appointed John Marshall as Chief Justice, to ensure that the Federalist Party would survive in the judiciary branch of

A lesson that would be stated repeatedly throughout his verdicts but never truly understood by citizens until the Civil War is that the states are subservient to the federal government, or that state law trumps federal law. For example in McCulloch vs. Maryland, where Maryland wanted to tax the building of a new national bank, where Maryland lost the case, as federal legislature supersedes state legislature. In this case, the legislation for a new bank trumped taxation of it. Furthermore, a more specific case of this issue is in the earlier case of Fletcher v. Peck, where Marshall declared the state law revoking the corrupt sale of land by bribed politicians was unconstitutional as the sale was good at the time of the land being sold, thus it is unconstitutional to revoke the sale of what was already sold. As true with both, it is shown that state government is weaker than federal government to ensure that a strong nation is run as one, rather than being pulled from each end by state governments. To summarize, John Marshall’s continuously diligent work as Chief Justice shaped American values to present