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Article: Expansion of Judicial Review
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- American Eras
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Expansion of Judicial Review
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Constitutionality of Legislation.
The power of courts to invalidate unconstitutional legislation is often regarded as one of the hallmarks of the American system of government, but judges had struck down laws very rarely and in narrowly defined situations prior to 1850. Only once in American history, in
Marbury
v.
Madison
(1803), had the U.S. Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, and the law involved in that case was a jurisdictional technicality. State courts had not been much more exacting. The New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, invalidated only three statutes
before 1820 and only three more in ...