ABSTRACT
The U.S. Supreme Court, as one American expert observed, is neither acourt nor a political agency, “it is inseparably both.”1 This special sta-tus derives from the court’s power of constitutional interpretation, a power effectively read into the Constitution by Chief Justice John Marshall in his opinion in Marbury v. Madison in 1803. “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department,” declared Marshall, “to say what the law is.” The Constitution amounts to a paramount law and, in the event of the ordinary law conflicting with it, the Court must resolve the conflict: “This is of the very essence of judicial duty.”2
