A MOST of you no doubt are aware, the present year has marked the twohundredth anniversary of Chief Justice John Marshall's birth. Marshall was born on the 24th of September 1755, in what is now Fauquier County, Virginia. He died in Philadelphia, while still holding the office of Chief Justice of the United States, a few weeks less than eighty years later. One hundred and twenty years have thus elapsed since John Marshall completed the judicial labors for which he is so greatly celebrated. In that long interval, ten other Americans have held the office that Marshall held, and three preceded him in it. Our Chief Justices have included some very distinguished and able men; but, by universal consent, Marshall is recognized to stand pre-eminent-indeed, unrivalled-among them. The appellation, "the great Chief Justice," is still today, as it long has been, a completely unambiguous reference to John Marshall, and to no one else. Now, I mean not to dissent from this universal view of Marshall's greatness; yet I do think that the true nature of his judicial career, particularly in the field of constitutional interpretation, has long been very generally misunderstood. According to the usual view, Marshall is conceived to have dominated his associates on the Supreme Court so completely that he was able to make the constitutional decisions of that tribunal express his own ideas and nothing else. His own ideas, it is further commonly assumed, were those of his own political party, the Federalists. So, the common view is that John Marshall was able to use, and did use, his domination of his court to read the old Federalist constitutional views into his court's decisions and thus to * This is a reprint of a speech delivered by Professor Crosskey as one of a series of talks on Justices of the Supreme Court delivered by various experts at the University of Chicago Law School. All of the speeches will be published this fall in book form under the title "Mr. justice." ' The old Federalist views of the Constitution are developed fully in Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States, passim (1953). This publication is hereinafter cited as P. & C. 'Ibid. The Annals of Congress covering the early years of the Government were a reprint of Thomas Lloyd's contemporaneously published Congressional Register, a private report of debates in the House of Representatives. The most casual inspection of Lloyd's Register discloses that it was not a complete report of these debates, but a report of picked and chosen parts, and of picked and chosen speeches. The reporting is uneven. Some of it is very well done and seemingly complete, as, for example, the debates, on June 8, 1789, when James Madison proposed the initial amendments to the Constitution. Other debates-for example, those on these same amendments, on August 19, 1789-are omitted entirely. And still other parts of the reporting-for example, that on the same subject, two days earlier-are, on the basis of other and better surviving evidence, demonstrably inaccu...