II. CRITIQUES FROM POLITICAL CONTEMPORARIES
Marshall is commonly viewed a champion of judicial supremacy, the view that the Court is the exclusive guardian of the Constitution, is the ultimate interpreter of its meaning, and is fundamentally a political institution seeking justice under the rubric of constitutional law. However, critics such as Matthew Frank, a Distinguished Fellow and professor emeritus of political science at Radford University, believe this characterization is a considerable overstatement of Marshall’s judicial principles and contributions of his jurisprudence. Instead realm of judicial power extended not to “not to seeping constitutional authority” over Congress or the President, but instead specifically to the “vindication …show more content…
However, the Constitution conferred the power of judicial review in the Supreme Court. This is evident in Article IIII, Section 1: “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish” And the Supremacy Clause found in Article IV. Since the framers made the Constitution the supreme law of the land, a court, exercising judicial power in a case involving a conflict between the Constitution and an inferior law, it must choose the Constitution. Charles Hobson contends that Marshall’s opinion in this case was not intended to enlarge the powers of the federal government, but rather to restrict state encroachments on the exercise of legitimate congressional …show more content…
Ogden (1824) as authority for unlimited congressional power over the regulation of commerce, Hobson stresses the limited scope of the decision. In fact, Marshall held only that the New York steamboat monopoly violated a federal licensing statute. Marshall defined commerce in broad terms, but he expressly recognized that state police power might affect interstate commerce and left “an ample field for state legislative activity in the area of commerce and the economy” (p. 145). The decision in Gibbons, Hobson explains, “was less about defining the extent of federal power than about setting limits on state sovereignty” (p. 145). The vast expansion of affirmative federal authority under the commerce clause that emerged from the New Deal cannot fairly be traced to Marshall.
In subsequent letters to the editor of the First Things journal the submitted by Herbert W. Titus, Matthew J. Franck, critique Robert L. Clinton’s article “How the Court Became Supreme” published in the January issue of the journal. In Clinton’s thesis, he argues that the conventional implication of the Marbury decision is incorrect because in the most often referenced section of Marshall’s opinion “No exclusive power to interpret the fundamental law is claimed for the Court here or anywhere else in [the