Our ninth and final seminar of our series on The Federalist concludes our discussion of judicial review, with a detour to the famous case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803 that supposedly settled the matter, though Lucretia draws some fine and original distinctions between what John Marshall did in Marbury and what the Supreme Court did forever afterwards.
From there we consider Hamilton’s argument in Federalist #84—the next to last Federalist Paper—that a Bill of Rights was not only unnecessary, but potentially dangerous. Hamilton lost that argument as a practical matter, but was his reasoning about this question wrong? Not necessarily, as we explain. Could we have been better off without a Bill of Rights? It seems unfathomable to think so, but we take in Herbert Storing’s thoughtful angle on this question.
Unfortunately a technical glitch bollixed our video recording of this final session, so we can’t post a YouTube video for people who like to follow along with our Power Point slides of the text and quotations we use. We’ll see if we can find an alternative mode to post them up.
So listen here, or wander over to the registrar’s office at Ricochet.
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