John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court

"Kent Newmyer is a great judicial biographer who wrote what I think many people would regard as the greatest judicial biography, the Joseph Story biography. This is my favorite among the many Marshall biographies. I’m inclined toward books that take the same approach that I do, which is putting the justices in their context, not suggesting they’re somehow neutral interpreters of the law, but rather acknowledging that they reflect their own experiences and they reflect the time period in which they exist. Before he was Chief Justice, John Marshall was a politician from Virginia and a participant in the 1788 Virginia Convention that ratified the Constitution. He was a leading commercial lawyer in Richmond during the 1790s, then served one term in Congress. But he made a name for himself in that term, defending the Federalist Party’s policies. A large part of what he’s famous for is reading nationalism into the Constitution. Decisions like McCulloch versus Maryland , in 1819, upheld the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States and established a very broad reading of congressional power. In his home state of Virginia, Richmond newspapers criticized the decision. Marshall responded pseudonymously in essays defending his decision. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Newmyer talks about where this nationalism came from. Marshall had been a soldier during the Revolutionary War and, like many participants in it, he emerged with a very nationalist inclination, partly because soldiers had risked their lives to build a nation and also because one of the obstacles to the war’s success was the obstinacy and obstructionism of the states. That made them inclined to support nationalism versus states’ rights. Marshall was also presiding over a Federalist Court, meaning a Court that shared the Federalist philosophy of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, at a time when political opposition to that philosophy was ascendant. To survive the Jeffersonian era and then later the Jacksonian era, he becomes a political strategist. Marshall tries to decide cases without provoking political adversaries, who could destroy him. McCulloch helps us understand how John Marshall wrote his philosophy into the Constitution, in a strategic way so that he doesn’t get swamped by the political opposition."