Premium
John Marshall’s Associate Justices
Author(s) -
Abraham Henry J.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of supreme court history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1540-5818
pISSN - 1059-4329
DOI - 10.1111/1540-5818.00049
Subject(s) - supreme court , citation , law , computer science , library science , political science
My fascination with, and indeed love for, the Supreme Court of the United States and its Justices began in my teens—a long, long time ago—and it has never wavered. Like other youthful and some not-so-youthful students and observers of the Court, I grew up thinking that John Marshall was our first Chief Justice, and that he wrote all of the Court’s opinions. Ultimately, it became fortuitously clear that he was not our first but fourth (counting John Rutledge’s unconfirmed service of a little more than four months in the center chair) and that Marshall did not write all of his Court’s opinions, just most of them, including a healthy majority of cases at constitutional law. Thus, of the 1,215 cases his Court handled during his long tenure of thirty-four and a half years—exceeded, to date, only by Justice Douglas’s thirty-six and a half and Justice Field’s thirty-four and three-quarters—Marshall penned 519. He wrote thirty-six of the sixtytwo that were decided on constitutional grounds, dissenting only once. He completely dominated his Court, effectively “Marshalling” it. One example is John Adams’s first appointment, Bushrod Washington, George Washington’s favorite nephew, who served with Marshall for twenty-five of his thirty-one years on the Court. He disagreed with the Chief only thrice, and thus was commonly referred to as Marshall’s second vote. In his long tenure on the Court, Washington wrote only seventy majority opinions, two concurrences, and but one formal dissent.