#1547 Jefferson, John Marshall, and Judicial Review

I want to thank all of you for listening. This is a really important case and it led to the doctrine of judicial review, which, you know, is now central to American life. If you take the Dobbs decision on overturning Roe v. Wade, for example, these nine unelected, unaccountable, unimpeachable, often conflicted members of the court make decisions that affect a whole nation of a third of a billion people.

So that doctrine that the Supreme Court can strike down a provision of a law, or strike down a law entirely that was not written into the original Constitution. That's something that was installed in 1803 by John Marshall. It wasn't without precedent in English and American thinking, but it wasn't in the Constitution itself. And Marshall's cleverness in the decision is one of the most famous moments in Supreme Court history. But we also talk about the personal relations between Jefferson and John Marshall, which were always icy at best, and mutually suspicious in most instances. I'm just back from a long journey in the American Southwest for listening to America.

So we're headed that way, as you know, and we had the most extraordinary time for nine days in Canyon Country. We were on the Hopi Indian Reservation, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, on the UTE Indian Reservation. We went to Lake Powell, we floated on Lake Powell, which I had never done before. We looked down at the Colorado River from a range of different canyon heights.

We went to four corners. One of the most Jeffersonian places in America. Let me quickly make the case for that. So Jefferson wanted square states identical in size, and he realized that the first 13 were a done deal. They couldn't be fixed. So he thought, well beyond the Appalachians, we'll make as many square identical size states as we possibly can.

He didn't quite get his way. But if you look at a map as you go farther west, it gets more rectilinear. More jeffersonian. When you get to states like Colorado and Wyoming, which are rectangles, or Utah and Arizona, which have lots of strong linear elements to them. Four corners, where the four states come together, is arguably the most Jeffersonian place in America. I'd never been, I've always wanted to go. I've seen it in films, of course, including the remake of the National Lampoon Vacation film. And so I talked my two very reluctant companions into going there, and it turned out to be great and hilarious.

So you'll be hearing more about that. Go to our new website, ltamerica..org. Our newsletter is about to be up and running. It's going to be a great new era this program, which is morphing to the new name Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.

I couldn't be more excited about this. This was a trip of a lifetime and more are coming, so watch for that. But as we close this podcast introduction to today's program, I just want to play a little more of my conversation with Bo Breslin. We actually recorded that before we sat down for the formal Jefferson Hour recording, and he was very interesting on these questions. So I'm just going to end with that.

Meanwhile, you can contribute if you have an airstream, if you know somebody who has an airstream, if you know somebody who knows somebody who has an airstream. I want one, I need one because this is going to allow me to follow John Steinbeck's 1960 travels with Charlie. Tour from Long Island all the way up to Maine, across the northern tier of America, down the West Coast, to Texas, to New Orleans, and back up to New York City. All of that in the year 2024. And so this would be a great, great gift to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. It doesn't have to be new, it just has to be splendid.

Anyway, let's listen to this little piece by Bo Breslin and then let's go to the show. I can't tell you how excited I am about the future. Thanks for listening. Please tell everyone you know.

Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Today, I interview my friend Bo Breslin of Skidmore College about the famous early Supreme Court decision Marbury v. Madison. Welcome Bo.

Thanks Clay, thanks for having me. I'm glad we're having these periodic conversations. I hope you continue to suggest other topics that we can discuss. I have such great fun, you know, when we get a chance to dig in on these things.

So Marbury v. Madison? Every law student, almost immediately in first year, has to face this famous case. February of 1803. And it involves the midnight appointments of John Adams, when Adams was discredited and returning to private life. One of the last things he did, in fact, the day before he left the presidency, was to appoint one, William Marbury, among others, to a minor judicial post in Washington, D..C.

A couple of dozen people altogether involved, more than 50, I think, altogether. And these were last-minute appointments confirmed by the United States Senate, therefore legally valid, and they were not all actually put into the hands of their intended recipients. And so, number one, I blame John Marshall. The Senate took time to confirm these, Marshall didn't put them into the hands.

And I always say to my students, I always say, Clay, that Marbury is the only real loser in this case. He goes down in history as a party to one of the most famous, if not the most famous, Supreme Court opinion. And Jefferson wins something big, Marshall wins something big, the Federalists win something big, the Republicans win something big, and the only real loser is Marbury. In this one of the ways. And there's so many fascinating parts to this particular case. But a lot of it, as you know, a lot of it comes from the lead up and all of the political tension that's going on at the time, right? So I say, the battle over Marbury is a battle of different political ideals, right? It is one of different personal personalities and personal will, right?

Marshall and Jefferson are the primary antagonists here. They were distant cousins, they hated each other, and there's a personal element to it too. It is one of political power, Marshall wants the court to have political power, Jefferson wants to have the court to have less political power. And so the battle is over whether or not the court's going to establish itself as a legitimate or credible institution. Co-equal, in the words of the framing generation.

It's also one about vision, class and political party right, the Yeoman farmer ideal of Jefferson versus the federalist ideal that Hamilton and Marshall agreed with. So the clash around Marbury versus Madison. The case itself is fascinating, but it's really the context around it. And then I'll say one more thing that is, Marshall misinterprets a lot of what he's charged with interpreting in order to get the outcome he wants. That's sort of the fascinating story behind Marbury versus Madison. Is his deliberate? I think it's deliberate. Lots of people do intentional misinterpreting of Article III and the Judiciary Act in order to get the outcome, which was judicial review.

He just exists as this straw man, if you want to put it that way, in this famous legal case. So, John Marshall is the Secretary of state, soon to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And a point that really needs to be made is that. However, Jefferson and his allies responded to this. John Adams had every constitutional right to fill every vacant office in the United States before leaving on the 4th of March 1801, right? he and the Congress had.

And so that's typically Jefferson graciousness. Of course, they're best friends. And he felt that he and Adams, as old friends, should have been in harmony on this, that Adams should have realized that he had been sent home after a single term, that the people had effectively rejected him, that they had put somebody else in his place, and that that somebody else should have a kind of free hand to surround himself with the kind of people that he liked and would support his policies and that this was a sort of a personal lack of gentlemanly decorum. And I think Jefferson is to a certain extent right about that. There is a punitive element in what Adams did.

He was definitely trying to punish Jefferson, to prevent Jefferson's Revolution, his Second American Revolution, from being as complete as Jefferson wanted it to be. But from a constitutional point of view, Jefferson's on very thin ground, saying that Adams should have refused to appoint any of these vacancies until Jefferson took office.

Now there will be five, so let's say one dies or quits. No appointment. Two have to go before Jefferson gets one. In the end, Jefferson wound up appointing three people to the Supreme Court.

He was disappointed, more or less, in all of them, because they weren't radical enough for Jefferson's idea of the country. But one more thing about all that, Beau, you know, so Jefferson believes that the people are sovereign, and because the people are sovereign. They had every chance of installing John Adams for a second term. They did not.

And because of that, he felt that Adams should be listening to that, that the people have repudiated you. Yes, you're still technically president, but appointments last longer than a presidential term. And so by appointing these people, including Chief Justice John Marshall, you are effectively denying the will of the people. Which has spoken to you quite clearly here. And I feel some ideological and intellectual.

They're remarkably different. Adams did not see the world in the way Jefferson did in that regard, I think Washington did right, so Adams is this puzzling middle piece of the puzzle here between Washington and Jefferson.

But yes, I think there's some sympathy for Jefferson's position. The people had spoken, and Adams, literally two weeks before he's leaving office, packs the federal judiciary. At best, it was uncivil, at worst it was egregious behavior.

And Jefferson would have then probably said, Oh, my dear sir, I trust you, that would have changed everything. But Adams was bitter. He was bitter because the people had turned him out. He was bitter because Jefferson had behaved in some unscrupulous ways during the campaign. Or Jefferson's advocates at least.

He was also personally grieving over his son, who died of acute alcoholism during this period. He felt, as he always felt through his whole life, that the American people did not give him the credit he deserved for being the prime figure in the American Revolution. And here was Jefferson, this Penman, this visionary, this intellectual voluptuary, who was not Adams, he was not as capable of understanding how a republic works as Adams was.

And here was Jefferson defeating him at the polls. And I think that all of those fueled a moment of uncivil behavior by John Adams that Jefferson was offended by. And I'll just close. We have to take a break here in a minute. Well, but then you remember that Jefferson's daughter, Maria, dies in 1804..

She had been close to Mrs Adams for a time. Abigail Adams was really angry with Jefferson for all sorts of reasons by now. And she never wanted to see or talk with him again, frankly. But his daughter dies, and so she says, I can't help but write to you, even though you know the ancient affection is over, because I felt so strongly about your daughter.

And then Jefferson, instead of just saying thank you, makes one of the big mistakes of his life. And he writes back and says one thing. And one thing only really bothered me about your husband. And that was the midnight appointments, and he should have, you know, blah, blah, blah. So then she really lets him have it. And so, she says, as this act, I am certain, was not intended to give any personal pain or offense to the appointments.

I think it a duty to explain it so far as I then knew my husband's views and design. The Constitution empowers the president to fill up offices as they become vacant. It was in the exercise of this power that appointments were made and characters selected. Who Mr. Adams considered as men faithful to the Constitution and where he personally knew them such as were capable of fulfilling their duty.

This was done by President Washington equally. And she just goes on, just to use the slang term, to tear Jefferson, a new one, in a way that almost nobody ever talked to Jefferson. I mean, she was one of the few people who could really let him have it. She was technically right, but she was wrong from the point of view of how a republic's very delicate harmonies need to operate.

And Jefferson was philosophically right, but technically wrong, and made a major mistake by bringing it up in his correspondence with Abigail Adams. So this is really an amazing background to this story. So we'll need to take a short break when we come back. Bo Breslin of Skidmore College. I want to ask you what Marshall did, because Marshall, in the third and least powerful branch of the United States government, is fighting for the legitimacy and the credibility of the court. But he knows one thing for sure he cannot get into a fundamental man-to-man controversy with Thomas Jefferson.

You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour with one of my favorite guests, Bo Breslin of Skidmore College. We get to do this thanks to Zoom technology. I don't get to your part of the world much, and I know you don't get to mine. I love this, I get to see you.

I get to see you in your office with the books behind you and all that academic accoutrement. We're talking about Marbury v. Madison, the famous 1803 Supreme Court case, certainly one of the top five cases in American constitutional history. You think? Plessy v. Ferguson, Dred, Scott Brown v.

Board of Education, you name them, this one has to be fundamental, right? Yeah, I think this is probably the most.

The U.

S. v. Lopez case in 1995. The Guns in School case, I think will have significant ramifications. And so I would put that among the tops, maybe the top 10 most impactful cases in the Supreme Court. But Marbury is the.

You see everything from the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions to Jefferson's 1801 message to Congress. Where he talks about multiple branches of government having the authority to rule legislation coming out of Congress or the states for that matter.

That's number one, which creates a problem for Jefferson. Jefferson also thought that veto presidential veto should only be used for constitutional purposes. So, when George Washington was president, he wrote to his Secretary of State, Jefferson, and said, I'm thinking of vetoing a bill. What do you think? And Jefferson said, Veto it if you think it's unconstitutional, but if it's just a policy disagreement, you have to let it go.

Legislative branch is supreme. If you disagree 100 with the policy, you have to let that stand unless you think there is a principle of constitutional violation here. So he thought, maybe this wouldn't have worked, but Jefferson thought there would be at least a tripartite system of constitutional review. Madison was sort of in that camp, too, for a while, and Jefferson then went farther and said. If the federal government unanimously violates its own procedures, the only answer, besides revolution or secession, is nullification. That the states will then have to repair the constitutional order because the federal government has gone mad. And so Jefferson has this kind of very diffused idea of this, which I actually think is really an interesting one. But most people are appalled.

Marshall says Look, there has to be a final arbiter. In a civil society, we're the experts who are set aside for permanent employment outside of the political process to guard the Constitution. And when we think that some provision of some law violates fundamental passages in the Constitution, we have to step forward and say this is unacceptable. Because we're the guardians of the meaning of this thing, right?

This is the legacy of Marbury versus Madison, his judicial review. So what's fascinating is Marshall has to thread a needle. Because, on the one hand, he does not want Jefferson to get away with a lot of the things that he's getting away with. Jefferson makes the argument that it's executive discretion that led him to keep the commissions in the drawer. Marshall says. This country is a country of laws, not of men. It's like a little bit of a slap in the face for Jefferson, who's arguing that it's up to him, essentially, whether or not he delivers the commission.

Marshall knows that if he rules in favor of Marbury, that Jefferson will ignore the order. And the Supreme Court will take many steps back in Marshall's quest to make it a co-equal branch. He knows that if he rules in favor of Marbury, which he desperately wants to do, Jefferson's going to ignore it. He also knows, though, that he can't just let Jefferson win the case. He needs to get something out of it, and judicial review is what he gets out of it.

So what's interesting is Marshall sacrifices the ability of the judiciary to get this writ of mandamus from the executive branch, which everybody was nervous about. On the Jeffersonian side, he sacrifices that in exchange for getting judicial review, in a brilliant masterstroke of judicial statesmanship. All right, so here's William.

Jefferson could have done it and just said, Okay, okay, but he chooses not to. The case gets to John Marshall, and Marshall knows that. If he rebukes the administration, it says, this thing should have been delivered, Madison should have delivered the commission. So this is a real an open political attack, but legally based on what Jefferson and Madison have done here. But he also knows, as you say, that if he says all right, hand it over, there's at least a good chance that Jefferson will say the court's made its decision.

Yeah, go ahead and try to enforce it because I ain't doing it now. I'm not sure a hundred percent that Jefferson wouldn't have handed it over. That's a debate we can have. But Marshall couldn't do that. Because if Jefferson just simply shrugged and turned away. After the court affirmed that Jefferson should hand over the commission to Marbury, the court loses. Credibility. May become the non-entity it may become just, you know, have a few original cases on maritime issues and diplomatic issues, and it may be the court of highest appeal. But it no longer can weigh in on fundamental questions of American life. Marshall understood this, that he could lose ground.

He's probably not going to gain ground by siding with William Marbury. He then slaps Madison and Jefferson around a little bit in the decision and then says, Well, too bad. Because Article 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 is actually unconstitutional. They should have been more careful in crafting that important enabling legislation because article 13 violates the Constitution of the United States. And therefore, I can't give William Marbury his relief because that provision of the Act was unconstitutional. All right, so he's giving the victory to Jefferson now.

You don't have to deliver the commission, right? Do you think that Jefferson and Madison understood what had just happened?

But yes, I think that Madison and Jefferson understood, they also, though Clay. I think they celebrated the victory, even though they had been, as you say, slapped around a little bit. It's also a victory for the Federalists. Because Jefferson is embarrassed by Marshall's opinion, Has Marbury a right to the commission? he demands? The answer is yes, Marshall says.

If he has a right and the right has been violated, it has been violated. Do the laws of this country afford him a remedy? Yes, the Writ of Mandamus is the remedy. If they afford him a remedy and they do, is it a mandamus issuing from this court? Unfortunately, no. So Jefferson loses on, kind of the moral side of it, because he's embarrassed by the fact that he violated Marbury's right by not delivering the commission.

So the Federals are all celebrating this moment in which Jefferson is embarrassed, but as I said, Marbury is the real loser in here. Federalists win, Marshall wins, gets judicial review, Jefferson wins, doesn't have to deliver the commission.

Marbury is the one loser in this whole.

In our time, Beau Marbury would go on.

And so, as you say, he's the big loser here. But that was the first instance of judicial review in American constitutional history. The second is Dred Scott, which is decades later. In our time, every spring, we wait for the big decisions. And we know that the court can make gigantic changes in American life. That never happened in Jefferson's two terms.

Again, it didn't happen in Madison's terms, it didn't happen in Monroe's terms. John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson. It doesn't happen until just before the Civil War that a second case of judicial review even occurs. And so, I mean, what do you think that Jefferson would say today? When a third of a billion people wait in May and June of every year to see what their destiny is going to be? As determined by people like John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas.

I think Jefferson would be really upset by the oligarchy nature of our political system. As a result of the Supreme Court's disproportionate power, it's no longer the least dangerous branch, to quote Publius. What were John Marshall's?

His other one is to establish the national government as supreme over the state. So you see things like you see cases like Coen's versus Virginia, or the most famous is McCulloch versus Maryland, Gibbons versus Ogden. These are all with the vertical distribution of power federalism. Marshall desperately wanted the federal government, the national government in D.C. to be more powerful than the states. And so he has those two goals during his 30 plus years.

But Marbury is the greatest case to establish the branch as a co-equal. How clever was Marshall, I mean?

Well, I think that, so the answer is no.

That is also his kind of strategic way of crafting or navigating what might be very different. Justices opinion Very few people thought Marbury versus Madison was going to be the case. That was the explosive case Stewart versus Laird, which dealt with, which was argued on the same day as Marbury versus Madison. Is the case that challenges the constitutionality of Jefferson's Repeal Act, the act that repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801. Everybody was nervous about that one.

All Jeffersonians were nervous about that one because they thought. Marshall and the Supreme Court would argue that the Repeal Act of 1802 would be unconstitutional. But no one of the brilliant strokes that Marshall does is he embeds judicial review in Marbury versus Madison, a comparatively obscure case. A lot of people think it was a bigger deal now, but it was at the time not the biggest deal. They didn't shut down the court in the 1802 term to avoid Marbury versus Madison, they shut down the court in the 1803 term to avoid Stewart versus Laird.

One of the master strokes that he does is he embeds judicial review in Marbury versus Madison, as opposed to Stewart versus Laird. So there's just a lot of things that Marshall does. That all turned out the right move, his instincts were right. And he, as I said, he navigates this really tough situation. Where Jefferson's on the one hand, breathing down his neck, Federalists on the other. And he navigates it in the most brilliant way to boost up the power of the court.

And so is Jefferson, right.

Well, it doesn't say anything. In article two about executive discretion. There's a certain irony in that Marshall can't embed some notion of judicial review that's not written in the Constitution but implied. And yet, Jefferson uses this notion of executive discretion as his primary argument, so it's a little bit of a hypocritical argument on Jefferson's part.

Madison 101.

Much more to talk about. We'll be back in just a minute. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

Welcome back to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Seated across from me, at least virtually, is Beau Breslin of Skidmore College. First of all, you said seriatim decisions, so nobody really said how the court should decide stuff. There was a tradition that different members of the court would write different decisions based upon what they had heard.

And that's kind of returned. Today. We get a lot of dissenting and concurring decisions today. Marshall wanted there to be a unanimous or consensus statement on things.

And so he managed to get that done. Jefferson believed that Marshall was a loose, lounging, tavern-seeking sort of guy who liked to have a glass of ale with common people in taverns. For Jefferson, that somehow discredited his cousin. And he also knew that Marshall used to call these breaks in the afternoon when the court was sitting and pour wine on, kind of the principle, it must be five o'clock somewhere, and that he was seducing these other justices.

Pretty ironic, given Jefferson's habits in the White House. But Jefferson felt that Marshall had undue influence over the others because of his strength of character and personality, but also because he was sort of flattering them a little with wine. And that he should be a justice with a kind of a remote judicial temperament. And Marshall looked on Jefferson as just kind of a loon, I think, and I think what drove Jefferson nuts about Marshall is that he was a Virginia Federalist. Jefferson believed there cannot be a Virginia Federalist.

If you're a Virginian, you're not a federalist. And so I think it just it actually just kind of enraged him that Marshall made the.

And Jefferson wanted to resist that as much as possible, Jefferson spoke.

So Marbury comes to the Supreme Court as a trial court. And Article 3, Section 2.2 of the Constitution says in all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be a party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. So Marbury thinks this is right, and the answer is for Marshall. There's no question that Madison is a public minister insofar, as a public minister is someone who, quote, represents the United States at a foreign court. The secretary of state with Madison is arguably the chief public minister.

Essentially, Marshall has to ignore that reality, and then the worst one clay is when Marshall has to ignore. The fact that the next sentence of the Constitution grants Congress exceptions to jurisdictional questions, those exceptions were exercised in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Congress has the authority to grant exceptions, and Marshall specifically does not mention that part of the sentence. In his opinion, he's manipulating, misreading deliberately parts of the Article 3 in order to get the outcome judicial review.

Article 3 is about the judiciary. The Constitution is only 4,500 or so words long. It's a very general and in some ways vague document, and so once it has been ratified in 1788. Now Congress has to go in and fill some of these gaps and create the kind of infrastructure, the kind of scaffolding to make these three branches work. And particularly the judiciary. So the Judiciary Act of 1789 could almost be called an addendum to the Constitution of the United States.

It's trying to figure out, now what? How do we populate this article? 3 branch? And I would say that it's a largely nonpartisan document, it's a structural document. But then Jefferson supplants John Adams to become the third president. And in its last days, the outgoing Congress of the United States passes the Judiciary Act of 1801, which is certainly a political document.

It's not solely a political document, but it's mostly one, and it's designed to deny Jefferson a chance to appoint people to the court. It relieves the justices of circuit writing, which they hated, it creates a bunch of new judgeships and so on. So when Jefferson sees this, he realizes that it was a political act, not a statesmanship act.

And so he decides he's going to chasten the court. So a couple of things happen. First of all, he starts off by denying Marbury and the others their commissions, so that's a political act of rebuke. Then he has the Judiciary Act of 1802 passed, which undoes a lot of the things in the Judiciary Act of 1801. Raises the number of justices, puts them back on the circuit, writing, maybe just to annoy them.

And so this is a political response. As if that's not enough, he goes after some members of the Article III branch. This is all a political set of maneuvers. You can't call this high-minded platonic statesmanship. They're knuckling it out over Article III.

So today, when we say, oh, the court is becoming politicized, we're ignoring the incredible.

They had a right to create the Judiciary Act of 1801.

Jefferson probably shouldn't have tried to eliminate those courtships, writing circuits and other questions. But on the other hand, the Judiciary Act of 1801 by the Federalists should not have attempted to limit the number of appointments that Jefferson could make. So they're both behaving pretty badly here, Bo, but they're playing with fire, it seems to me.

And one of the things I give Marshall credit for is bringing long-term stability and credibility to the Supreme Court of the United States.

I think that one of the most shameful things in American public life is a Senate hearing of a Supreme Court justice. It's really low, low, low theater.

And so all of his decisions, Cohen's McCullough and others, move towards a stronger central government and a weakening of state sovereignty. That's a vision or a sense that he has, which is respectable. Should one very strong member of the court have that kind of power to turn the constitutional settlement, as strongly as he did towards national centrality?

And I think the what we would describe as the modern version of John Marshall is Earl Warren, right? So there's no question that the during Warren's from 1953 to 1969, this rights revolution is driven in large part by. This. Would be a fascinating, especially if you're in Listening to America. A fascinating episode is. Think about the ways in which Earl Warren was both politically masterful in getting the court to move in particular directions. He had some help, there's no question about it. He has quite a liberal court, but Brown is a fascinating case study in his ability to maneuver and convince and persuade.

In the same way that Marshall is able to do it on federalism, Warren is able to do it in civil rights and civil.

They hated it, of course, because there were no hotels and the roads were terrible, and they hated to travel in this way and so on, and so forth. So Jefferson, then, I think, mostly in a punitive way in the Judiciary. Act of 1802 forces them back into riding circuit, and the irony is, of course, that in 1807, Marshall is riding circuit in Richmond. When Jefferson's nemesis, Aaron Burr, is tried for treason. And so the two of them play out yet another drama. Because here again, Marshall mostly gets the best of Jefferson, but not entirely so. Marshall says that Jefferson should be subpoenaed to come and make the case for the government.

Jefferson, of course, refuses. He asserts executive immunity and executive privilege, but he does compromise and agree to send many of the documents that Marshall wants. Marshall then has dinner with Aaron Burr a couple of times in Richmond, and then decides, Sort of in the middle. He says that Burr is not guilty because not proved guilty, doesn't acquit him, but he doesn't convict him. And so here they go again, these two mighty figures of Virginia.

Yeah, it's just fascinating to think.

So Marshall helps to create the historiography of the Washington Administration and the Federalist Party. And Jefferson spends the rest of his life trying to find somebody who will write a counter-history. Thought of doing it himself, but he didn't. But here, Marshall wins again by writing this extraordinary encomium to the brilliance of George Washington. As against these.

Yeah, so I know we're used to thinking about contemporary biographies and things that are happening. But I'm going to draw your attention to one that was written, I think, 70 years ago. Albert Beveridge has a four-volume biography of John Marshall, four volumes, four volumes that is well worth picking up.

The Marbury versus Madison is in volume two, if you want to go directly to it. But it's a wonderful, detailed history of Marshall's life from beginning to end. So if I had, you know, go to the library and pick out Albert Beveridge's four-volume set, and, you know, maybe pick up one of them. Marshall has a fascinating life outside of Marbury versus Madison, so I would encourage your listeners to go there.

I say James F. Simon's book What Kind of Nation? Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and the Epic Struggle to create the United States. That's one slender volume of a couple of hundred pages. James Simon, What kind of nation?

Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and the Epic Struggle. What else are you reading? What are you reading? That's not.

And he's a constitutional theorist, so he argues about various things related to constitutions and how the U.

S Constitution shaped the people and how the people shaped the Constitution. Fascinating piece of work. So if I could have one book that I mention on, I would do John Finn's Peopling the Constitution, Peopling the Constitution.

Everyone, stay tuned. we'll see you next week for another important edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

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