Constitutionality of Legislation.

The power of courts to invalidate unconstitutional legislation is often regarded as one of the hallmarks of the American system of government, but judges had struck down laws very rarely and in narrowly defined situations prior to 1850. Only once in American history, in Marbury v. Madison (1803), had the U.S. Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, and the law involved in that case was a jurisdictional technicality. State courts had not been much more exacting. The New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, invalidated only three statutes before 1820 and only three more in each of the next two decades. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall (1801-1835) had ruled that various state laws violated the federal constitution, but this exercise of judicial review had focused primarily on preventing state infringements...