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Basic Governing Principles
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The Judiciary occupies the third branch of government and possesses a powerful tool to check abuses of office by both the executive and legislative branches: the authority to declare acts of Congress and the President unconstitutional. The power of judicial review derives not from the Constitution, which contains no explicit reference to this authority, but from a series of cases dating back to the late 1700s.
One of the earlier illustrations of the Supreme Court's exercise of its judicial review powers was in Hylton v. United States, a 1796 Supreme Court decision wherein the Court upheld a federal tax on carriages. Indeed, flexing a judicial right to hold laws unconstitutional predates the passage of the Constitution as some Colonial judges were known to have invalidated state laws on the grounds that they violated a state constitutional provision.
But the case most frequently cited in connection with judicial review powers is the Supreme Court's 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison. In declaring part of a federal statute null and void on the ground that it conflicted with the Constitution, Chief Justice John Marshall articulated a detailed doctrine of judicial review, and concluded that the Constitution implicitly grants to the Supreme Court the power to invalidate any law that, in the Court's opinion, violates the Constitution. Seven years following its decision in Marbury, the Supreme Court extended its judicial authority by ruling on the constitutionality of a Georgia statute in the 1810 Fletcher v. Peck case. By asserting its judicial reviewing powers over both federal and state laws and acts, the Supreme Court secured for itself the role of chief interpreter and arbiter of the Constitution
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