Chief Justice John Marshall
Today’s Justice of the Day is: JOHN MARSHALL. Chief Justice Marshall was born on this day, September 24, in 1755.
Chief Justice Marshall was born in Prince William Country, Virginia, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He did not receive any formal university education, which was not at all uncommon for people for his era.
In 1775, Chief Justice Marshall began a one-year stint as a Minutemen lieutenant in Culpeper County (Virginia), after which he became a lieutenant with the Eleventh Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army. His service in the American Revolutionary War came to an end in 1780, and he entered private practice later that year, first in Fauquier County, Virginia (from then to 1783), and then in Richmond, Virginia (from 1783 to 1797). During his time as a private attorney in Richmond, Chief Justice Marshall also served as a Member of the Virginia House of Delegates (in 1782, from 1784 to 1785, and from 1787 to 1788) and the Virginia Council of State (from 1782 to 1784), a Recorder for the Richmond City Hustings Court (a predecessor to today’s Circuit Court of the City of Richmond, where he worked from 1785 to 1788), and a Delegate to the Virginia Convention to Ratify the United States Constitution (in 1788). Immediately after leaving private practice, he became the Minister to France on behalf of the United States Department of State, and remained in that position from 1797 to 1798, the year before he took office as a Member of the United States House of Representatives from his home state of Virginia. Chief Justice Marshall left the House upon becoming the Secretary of State in 1800, where he would remain until his appointment as Chief Justice of the United States.
Chief Justice Marshall was nominated by President John Adams on January 20, 1801, to a seat vacated by Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 27, and received his commission on January 31. Chief Justice Marshall took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on February 4, and his service was terminated on July 6, 1835 (his is the fourth longest tenure of any Member of the SCUS), due to his death.
Chief Justice Marshall might well be the single most important Member of the SCUS in the Court’s history. It is from his early decisions, like Marbury v. Madison (1803) and McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), that the SCUS draws its legitimacy as an institution and derives its power to call upon the other branches and departments of government to listen to its judgments. Additionally, Chief Justice Marshall’s opinions served to more clearly define the scope of the Federal government’s authority, establishing its inherent supremacy over the states. Without these early decisions, the SCUS might well have never been able to gain and maintain the power to decide a great many of the tens of thousands of cases that have followed. In light of all that Chief Justice Marshall did for the early Republic, one can totally understand why President Adams once said: "My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life.”