Marbury took Madison to court seeking the delivery of the commission, and in a closely watched decision now-Chief Justice John Marshall chastised the administration for failing to fulfill its legal obligation of delivering a valid commission but concluded that the Court did not have proper jurisdiction to resolve the case (despite a federal statute purporting to grant such jurisdiction). Jefferson, believing that commissions were not valid until sign, sealed and delivered, instructed Madison to hold off on delivering any remaining commissions until the administration had decided how they wanted to proceed. The Republican Thomas Jefferson had won the presidency in a bitterly contested 1800 election, and his secretary of state, James Madison, had inherited the leftover paperwork from his predecessor, including Marbury’s commission. Then-Secretary of State John Marshall had the duty of delivering judicial commissions to the new appointees, but Marshall failed to get all of them delivered in those last frantic days and hours as Adams packed the courts with friendly Federalists. William Marbury was nominated and confirmed to be a justice of the peace in the nation’s capital in the last days of the Federalist John Adams’s administration. Her text gives what I believe is a still common view of Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1803 decision in Marbury v.

But I reserve the right to pick nits nonetheless. Reducing all of American history to accessible and interesting highlights for consumption by the average teenager and jumping through all the bureaucratic and political hoops to get the content into the classroom is no easy task.

I don’t envy anyone who sets out to write a high-school history textbook. But lately, she’s decided to provoke me with her history lessons on the early republic, and that’s just taking things too far. My daughter enjoys horrifying me with tales of daily life in a modern high school, and who am I to deny her such small pleasures.

Chief justice john marshall