John Marshall: The Man Who Built the Supreme Court

The federal judiciary as Americans understand it, an independent branch capable of striking down acts of Congress, was not written into the Constitution so much as it was argued into existence by one man working from this house.

John Marshall built this home in seventeen ninety in the neighborhood Richmonders called the Court End, close to the state capitol and the law offices of the city's growing legal community. He lived here for forty-five years, longer than he lived anywhere else. He died here in eighteen thirty-five.

In between, he reshaped American government more than almost any official who never held elected office. Marshall became Chief Justice of the United States in eighteen oh one, appointed by President John Adams in the final weeks of the Adams administration. He would serve for thirty-four years, the longest of any chief justice, and write or shape more than one thousand decisions.

The one that mattered most came in eighteen oh three: Marbury versus Madison. The case seemed minor, a dispute over a judicial appointment. Marshall used it to establish something the Constitution had left ambiguous: that the Supreme Court had the authority to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. Judicial review, the principle that an unelected court could invalidate democratic legislation, was not obvious. It was not inevitable. Marshall made it real through the sheer force of a written argument.

From that ruling forward, the Court was a genuinely co-equal branch of the federal government, not an appendage. Marshall's house remained almost unchanged through the decades. Preservation Virginia has operated it as a museum since nineteen eleven, and it still holds the largest collection of Marshall family pieces in existence. It is, in a real sense, the birthplace of the judiciary Americans take for granted.