6 - State Challenges to the Supreme Court’s Control over Constitutional Interpretation

Summary

A series of important lawsuits in the 1820s represented an increasingly stark division in American thinking about the role and authority of the Supreme Court in: Hunter v. Martin, Devise of Fairfax (1814), Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816), McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), and Cohens v. Virginia (1821). That debate over federalism reflected fundamentally different views of the foundation and formation of the Constitution. For John Marshall and other nationally minded Americans, the Constitution had been established as the act of one national people, forming a national government with considerable powers. For states’ rights advocates, the Constitution was a compact of sovereign states, leaving state sovereignty largely intact except for limited and express grants of powers to the national government. Those competing views shaped how each side regarded the role and authority of the Supreme Court, and rhetoric became more extreme as nationalists feared disunion and states’ rights advocates feared the disintegration of state authority, including over slavery.