And, in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, a suit against Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison, Marshall granted to the Supreme Court a power it had not been granted in the Constitution: the right to decide whether laws passed by Congress are constitutional. Marshall declared: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”41 One day, those words would be carved in marble; in 1803, they were very difficult to believe.
