{"id":239,"date":"2022-08-30T01:05:18","date_gmt":"2022-08-30T01:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211constitution\/?page_id=239"},"modified":"2025-10-13T18:26:44","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T18:26:44","slug":"judicial-review","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-211constitution\/syllabus\/judicial-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Judicial Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Thus, the source of judicial review as Americans understand it today lay not in the idea of fundamental law or in written constitutions, but in the transformation of this written fundamental law into the kind of law that could be expounded and constructed in the ordinary court system.” –Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty, p. 139<\/p>\n

“When the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he pointed out that lawyers had come to constitute whatever aristocracy America possessed, at least in the North.\u00a0 Through their influence on the judiciary, they tempered America’s turbulent and unruly majoritarian governments and promoted the rights of individuals and minorities.\u00a0 ‘The courts of justice,’ Tocqueville said, ‘are the visible organs by which the legal profession is enabled to control the democracy.’\u00a0 It is still a shrewd judgment.” –Gordon Wood, Power and Liberty, p. 148<\/p>\n

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Timeline of Judicial Review<\/strong><\/h2>\n