Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 84

Judicial power is the power to interpret the laws and to judge whether they have been broken. Naturally, by establishing how a given law is to be understood, the courts (the agents of judicial power) end up making law as well. Our constitutional provisions for the establishment of the judiciary are brief and vague; much of the American federal judiciary under the Supreme Court is left to Congress to arrange. But the founders left plenty of clues as to how they felt about judicial power in their debates and their writings, particularly in The Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper editorials written to encourage people to support and vote for the new Constitution.

For instance, the practice of judicial review is introduced through the back door, first mentioned by Hamilton in Federalist No. 78 and then institutionalized by the Supreme Court itself with Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison, a dispute over presidential appointments. Judicial review allows the Supreme Court to rule that an act of Congress or the executive branch (or of a state or local government) is unconstitutional—that is, that it runs afoul of constitutional principles. This review process is not an automatic part of lawmaking; the Court does not examine every law that Congress passes or every executive order to be sure that it does not violate the Constitution. Rather, if an individual or a group challenges a law as unjust or unconstitutional, and if it is appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, the justices may decide to rule on it.

judicial power the power to interpret laws and judge whether a law has been broken