 |
| Taken by me on my trip to Washington D.C. in 2015 |
Like most of government institutions in this country, the Supreme Court has grown and changed since its conception. Although I previously had a standard knowledge of the Supreme Court and its workings, there were still new things I learned while researching for this blog. For example, learning of the initial limited and ambiguous nature of the Supreme Court intrigued me. I had assumed that the nature and function of the Supreme Court and its rulings had remained constant since its establishment.
The principal function of the Supreme Court as we understand it today is to decide whether laws or lower court rulings are constitutional. I always assumed that this was the intent from the beginning, but although it was outlined at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, what we now know as "judicial review" wasn't fully cemented until 1803. It was here when Chief Justice John Marshall used the case of Marbury v. Madison to establish judicial review as the right of the court to review all facets of government and deem them constitutional or not. This court also established another crucial aspect of the Supreme Court- legal precedence.
Precedence is the first court case to establish a rule or legal doctrine. Such as the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 which ruled that separate but equal facilities in public spaces WAS constitutional, however this ruling was later overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education.
Since then, the Supreme Court's role in our government has been pretty straightforward and consistent: Hear important cases that have been appealed through the district and appellate courts, and make a ruling on their constitutionality. Same applies to any legislation passed through Congress.
