Interpreting the Constitution: the Supreme Court

Because the meaning of the Constitution is sometimes subject to interpretation, the task of interpreting its meaning has been a central facet of American history, a task that has generally fallen to the Supreme Court.

The Constitution says very little about the exact powers of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1803, in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, the Court famously declared that it had the power of judicial review, which enabled it to determine whether laws and acts by the government were constitutional or not. In the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, "It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is." This power made the Court into a much more powerful branch of government than it had been prior to this ruling. The Court seldom declared laws unconstitutional in the early nineteenth century: not until 1857 (in the case Dred Scott, an escaped slave) would the Court again strike down a law passed by Congress. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the Court would intervene more frequently, especially to strike down government efforts to regulate the economy. In the decades after World War II, the Court would again play an enormous role in American life, upholding civil rights for black Americans, the rights of persons accused of crimes, the "right to privacy," and the right to obtain an abortion. In more recent decades, the Court has taken a more conservative turn, and has generally intervened to tilt the balance of power away from the federal government and back toward the separate states.