ABSTRACT
As far back as the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries astute observers, including Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, noted that Americans tend to hold the legal process in high regard. Nevertheless, attitudes toward judicial power were cautious in the beginning. The new Constitution itself subjected the federal courts to important political checks. It vested the judicial power in one supreme court and such inferior courts as Congress might establish. Congress had authority to make exceptions to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and, within broad limits, to define the jurisdiction of the lower courts. Despite a reference to the right of a sovereign people to establish their fundamental law, Marbury did not attempt to justify the power of judicial review with any evidence that the drafters or ratifiers of the Constitution intended that courts have the power to reject the judgments of the political branches about the meaning of that document.
