The lecture wasn't terrible. As i mentioned to Allie below, he tossed out lots of cases which made it a bit difficult for those of us not familiar with these litanies of cases. Trying to follow the quick statements about what each case was, about what law was getting invalidated... some of it just kinda washed over me.
He mentioned that there's nothing in the actual wording of the Constitution giving the Supreme Court the power to decide whether legislation is constitutional or not, that it was just implied in the structures of the powers and systems and so on, but Judge Marshall in Marbury vs. Madison made a judgement on incredibly broad grounds that in fact the Supreme Court could do that.
This was new and interesting, as was his argument that Dred Scott was a fictitious case.
He talked about how Marshall's ruling could have been challenged, but it didn't really do much, so those opposed to it didn't really have any ground on which to challenge it. He said it was used 26 times in the 19th century but in the 20th century it has been used 150 times (i think the 150 figure he kept repeating was for the 20th century -- it was his figure for approximately how many times it has been invoked against federal statutes anyway; it has been used to overturn 1150 state statutes). He argued that the vast majority of those cases could have been decided using the powers already invested in the court by Article 3 of the constitution. In fact, the only exception to that was the flag-burning case, which led to an interesting discussion about whether the knowledge that the Supreme Court can rule legislation unconstitutional makes some legislation more likely to pass (you can pass legislation to please your constituents, then say "oh, look, overruled, not my fault") or less likely to pass (knowing something is likely to get overruled you don't pass it to begin with).
even though Corel said it was 3586, LJ said it was 4362, so i'll just chop this in half
He mentioned that there's nothing in the actual wording of the Constitution giving the Supreme Court the power to decide whether legislation is constitutional or not, that it was just implied in the structures of the powers and systems and so on, but Judge Marshall in Marbury vs. Madison made a judgement on incredibly broad grounds that in fact the Supreme Court could do that.
This was new and interesting, as was his argument that Dred Scott was a fictitious case.
He talked about how Marshall's ruling could have been challenged, but it didn't really do much, so those opposed to it didn't really have any ground on which to challenge it. He said it was used 26 times in the 19th century but in the 20th century it has been used 150 times (i think the 150 figure he kept repeating was for the 20th century -- it was his figure for approximately how many times it has been invoked against federal statutes anyway; it has been used to overturn 1150 state statutes). He argued that the vast majority of those cases could have been decided using the powers already invested in the court by Article 3 of the constitution. In fact, the only exception to that was the flag-burning case, which led to an interesting discussion about whether the knowledge that the Supreme Court can rule legislation unconstitutional makes some legislation more likely to pass (you can pass legislation to please your constituents, then say "oh, look, overruled, not my fault") or less likely to pass (knowing something is likely to get overruled you don't pass it to begin with).